Associate Executive Director, interACT: Advocates for Intersex Youth

Bria Brown-King (They/She) is a Black, queer, non-binary, and intersex person. Bria got their start in intersex advocacy in 2018 as an interACT Youth Advocate. In 2019, they became the first openly intersex person to speak about intersex issues on the steps of the Supreme Court. In their current role, Bria facilitates education on intersex issues, works to close the gap in intersex-affirming research and data collection, and serves on multiple advisory boards, representing intersex people nationally and internationally.

Assistant Professor - University of Illinois Chicago

William Estrada is currently the Director of Undergraduate Studies in Art Education and an Assistant Professor at UIC School of Art & Art History, and was a teaching artist at Telpochalli Elementary School for 23 years. Estrada's approach to both art and teaching is centered on collaborative discourse. His roles as a teacher, artist, and cultural worker are intertwined. He draws on academic literature, educational settings, and personal interactions to report, record, reveal, and amplify lived experiences, aiming to foster radical imagination.

Instagram

Director of Research, Distributed AI Research Institute

A sociologist by training, Dr. Alex Hanna’s work centers on the data used in new computational technologies, and the ways in which these data exacerbate racial, gender, and class inequality. She also works in the area of social movements, focusing on the dynamics of anti-racist campus protest in the US and Canada. She holds a BS in Computer Science and Mathematics and a BA in Sociology from Purdue University, and an MS and a PhD in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Dr. Hanna is the co-author of The AI Con (Harper, 2025), a book about AI and the hype around it. With Emily M. Bender, she also runs the Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 series, playfully and wickedly tearing apart AI hype for a live audience online on Twitch and her podcast.

Assistant Professor of Political Science and Black Study

Desireé R. Melonas searches and teaches in the areas of Black political thought, Black geographies, new materialism, and Black feminist thought, and is working on her book manuscript entitled Place in Black: Moving Racial Geographies. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in, among others, Theory & Event, Meridians, Women Studies Quarterly (WSQ), National Review of Black Politics, Philosophy and Global Affairs, the Journal of Women, and Politics, & Policy. Desireé is a 2020-2021 Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellow and is currently a Co-Principal Investigator on a $1.25 million National Academies of Sciences grant to assist in developing environmental justice-focused, community-engaged curricular interventions in Africatown, Alabama and surrounding areas.

Aramont Professor of the History of Science and Professor of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Harvard University

Sarah S. Richardson is a historian and philosopher of science specializing in the sciences of sex, gender, sexuality, and reproduction. Richardson is the author of The Maternal Imprint: The Contested Science of Maternal-Fetal Effects and Sex Itself: The Search for Male and Female in the Human Genome. She founded and directs the Harvard GenderSci Lab, a collaborative, interdisciplinary research lab dedicated to generating concepts, methods, and theories for biomedical research on sex and gender.

GenderSci Lab

Assistant Professor, College of Science & Technology Studies, affiliations in Anthropology and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Wesleyan University

Mitali Thakor’s current book project, Facing the Child: Surveillance, Care, and the Policing of Violent Images Online (MIT Press), is an ethnography of artifice, evidence, and the global policing of images of sexual violence against children ("child pornography"). Her second project is a multidisciplinary study of robotic and animate companions in eldercare, childcare, and other spaces of intimate companionship. She is the Co-Director of Black Box Labs, a faculty-student research laboratory using collaborative research to decipher methods, translate technoscience, and foster justice. Mitali earned her PhD from the doctoral program in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society at MIT and has held a postdoctoral fellowship in the Sexualities Project at Northwestern University.

Personal Website

@mitalithakor (X, BlueSky)

Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Data Science, UNC Charlotte

Dr. Damien Patrick Williams teaches and researches on how technologies such as algorithms and "AI," and biotechnologies are impacted by the values, knowledge systems, philosophical explorations, social structures, and religious beliefs of human beings. Dr. Williams received his PhD from Virginia Tech in the field of Science, Technology, and Society, and has served on the boards and advisory panels of non-profit organizations such as the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Disability Inclusion Fund, and the JustSpace Alliance, and has consulted for universities and research and development groups such as Olin College, Tufts, and SRI International. He has been interviewed for multiple publications, including TIME Magazine, and been invited to speak at dozens of international conferences. All of Dr. Williams' research is concerned with how the knowledges and experiences of marginalized peoples affect and should be centered within the technosocial structures of human societies.

Personal Website