As Research Lead at the AI Now Institute, Dr. Rankin develops and oversees the strategy and initiatives for AI Now’s Gender, Race, and Power in AI program. She brings to AI Now her decade of experience working at the intersection of technology and education combined with her academic expertise.

Her book A People’s History of Computing in the United States (Harvard University Press, 2018) has been featured in The Nation,  Public Books, and the Australian Book Review and widely reviewed elsewhere. Dr. Rankin’s essays have been published in both popular and academic media, including Slate,  Lady Science, the Smithsonian’s What It Means to Be American series, Information & Culture, and IEEE Annals of the History of Computing.

She has shared her historical expertise at venues ranging from MIT, Cambridge, and New York University to the United Nations, Computer History Museum, and Google and consulted on projects including the pilot television episode of Girls Code, and the documentaries The Queen of Code and The Birth of BASIC.

Dr. Rankin earned her PhD from Yale in 2015; prior to that she also studied at MIT, Duke, UCL, Cambridge, and Dartmouth, where she earned her BA with a double major in mathematics and history.