The Digital Good Network College of Experts brings together experts from diverse disciplines (both within and beyond the social sciences), career stages, domains and sectors. The College will advise the network and link us to relevant stakeholders. The Digital Good Network is an independent entity and the role of the College of Experts is advisory only.
They will:
Help us work towards of our objectives
Participate in an annual digital good horizon scanning exercise
Join one of our smaller Advisory Boards, which will meet annually or twice yearly
Participate in occasional Digital Good Network events
Review Digital Good Network funding applications.
Saeema Ahmed-Kristensen is a Professor of Engineering Design & Innovation, and Co-Director of INDEX at Exeter University (London offices). She is currently Director for the £12.6 million UKRI Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council Next Stage Digital Economy Centre – DIGITlab. Her expertise includes novel human-centred methods to integrate user data, knowledge and information for improvements to products, services and process impacting both academia and practice.
Advisory Board Technology translations & industry engagement
Louise Amoore is Professor of Political Geography at Durham University, UK. She works on the politics of technology, with a special interest in machine learning, algorithmic systems, and biometrics. She is author of ‘Cloud Ethics: Algorithms and the Attributes of Ourselves and Others’ (Duke University Press, 2020), and ‘The Politics of Possibility: Risk and Security Beyond Probability’ (Duke University Press, 2013). She is currently leading an ERC advanced grant on ‘Algorithmic Societies: Ethical Life in the Machine Learning Age’ (2020-25).
Seyram Avle is Assistant Professor of Global Digital Media in the Department of Communication at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her research, funded by various institutions including the National Science Foundation (US), focuses on digital technology cultures and innovation across parts of Africa, China, and the United States. This work primarily takes a critical approach towards understanding how digital technologies are made and used, as well as their implications for issues of labor, identity, and futures.
Shakuntala Banaji is Professor of Media, Culture and Social Change and Director of the Master’s in Media, Communication and Development in the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her research covers media, race and gender, audiences, participation, new media and disinformation.
Advisory Board Community, policy & civil society engagement
Nancy Baym is a Senior Principal Research Manager at Microsoft Research. Her research concerns social dynamics of new communication technologies. Prior to joining Microsoft in 2012, she was a Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Kansas. Hent books include Twitter: A Biography (co-authored with Jean Burgess, 2020, NYU) and Playing to the Crowd: Musicians, Audiences, and the Intimate Work of Connection (2018, NYU). She has written numerous journal articles and book chapters and serves on the editorial boards of New Media & Society, The Information Society, Social Media & Society, and other journals.
She was a co-founder of the Association of Internet Researchers and served as its second president. She has been recognized with the Frederick Williams Prize for Contributions to the Study of Communication and Technology awarded by the International Communication Association, the naming of the Nancy Baym Book Award by the Association of Internet Researchers, and an Honorary Doctorate from the Faculty of Information Technology at the University of Gothenburg.
Jean Burgess is Professor of Digital Media in the Digital Media Research Centre (DMRC) and School of Communication at Queensland University of Technology. After serving as the DMRC’s founding Centre Director from 2015-2020, she became Associate Director of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society, as well as Convenor of its Queensland University of Technology node, in August 2020.
Jean’s research focuses on the social implications of digital media technologies, platforms, and cultures, as well as new and innovative digital methods for studying them. She is the author or editor of more than 120 scholarly publications on these topics. Her latest book is Everyday Data Cultures (Polity Press, 2022), co-authored with Kath Albury, Anthony McCosker and Rowan Wilken.
Sofia Gkiousou is a technology policy professional currently working at Google. She is leading policy on Privacy Sandbox, an initiative that aims to create technologies that both protect people’s privacy online and give developers tools to build thriving digital businesses. Sofia joined Google after several years at Airbnb and the energy industry, where she concentrated on the power of technology to transform communities. She retains a research interest in online communities and her published work concerns gaming and blogging narratives.
Advisory Board Technology translations & industry engagement
Tabitha Goldstaub is an advisor to government, academia and business on all things AI. Currently Executive Director of Innovate Cambridge. Former Chair of the UK government’s AI Council. Co-founder of CogX, an app and science & technology festival. Tabitha was also the co-founder of Rightster (IPO 2011) and author of How To Talk To Robots – A Girlsguide to a World Dominated by AI (HarperCollins, 2021).
Advisory Board Community, policy & civil society engagement
Susan Halford is Professor of Sociology at the University of Bristol and co-Director of the ESRC Centre for Sociodigital Futures. A Geographer by training, and a Sociologist for many years, her research cuts across Social Sciences and Engineering with a focus on the politics of digital data, methods and infrastructures.
Advisory Board Digital society networking
David Hesmondhalgh is Professor of Media, Music and Culture in the School of Media and Communication at the University of Leeds, UK. From 2021-26, he is PI on a five-year research project, funded by a European Research Council Advanced Research Grant, on Music Culture in the Age of Streaming.
Jeanette Hofmann teaches at the Institute for Media and Communication Studies of Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. She also heads the research group “Politics of Digitalisation” at the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB), she is a founding co-director of the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society, and principal investigator at the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society.
Linda Kaye is Associate Head of Psychology at Edge Hill University. She specialises in cyberpsychology, broadly she seeks to understand how online worlds affect our everyday experiences and behaviour, and the extent to which we can understand human psychology from studying people’s online behaviour. Her overarching research aims are to explore how online settings may promote social inclusion and well-being. A cross-cutting theme of all her research relates to identity and inclusion, and how we can ensure we are supporting an inclusive society via online environments.
Linda is also one of four founding members and now currently Past Chair of the British Psychological Society’s Cyberpsychology Section. This work has resulted in her being involved in a wide range of task groups and policy enquiries. Further, she has her own private consultancy company “The CyberDoctor” in which she works with a range of business clients to help them understand their online consumers from their online behaviour.
Dorothea Kleine is Professor of Human Geography and the Director of the Institute for Global Sustainable Development (IGSD) at the University of Sheffield. At IGSD she leads the Digital, Data and Innovation group. She works on digitalisation for sustainable development and global justice, combining theoretical work with policy engagement and participatory work with partners and communities. She advises UN bodies on digital innovation and sustainable development, as well as collaborating with UNICEF and the Malala Fund in research on gender and digital learning. She is co-author of the report, Digital Reset: Redirecting Technologies for the Deep Sustainability Transformation (Oxford University Press, 2023).
Derek McAuley is Professor of Digital Economy, University of Nottingham. His research expertise is in ubiquitous computing, computer architecture, networking, distributed systems and operating systems, while his interdisciplinary interests include issues of ethics, identity, privacy, information policy, regulation and economics within a digital society.
He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and British Computer Society and member of the UK Clinical Research Collaboration, a computing research expert panel of the Institution of Engineering and Technology and BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT.
Advisory Board Interdisciplinarity Technology translations & industry engagement
Author of the recent book, Black Software: The Internet & Racial Justice – From the Afronet to Black Lives Matter (Oxford University Press, 2019), Charlton McIlwain is Vice Provost for Faculty Development & Engagement at New York University, and Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU Steinhardt. He works at the intersections of computing technology, race, inequality, and racial justice activism. He has served as an expert witness in landmark US Federal Court cases on reverse redlining/racial targeting in mortgage lending, and recently testified before the US House Committee on Financial Services about the impacts of automation and artificial intelligence on the financial services sector.
He writes regularly for outlets such as The Guardian, Slate’s Future Tense, MIT Technology Review and other outlets about the intersection of race and technology. McIlwain is the founder of the Center for Critical Race & Digital Studies, heads NYU’s Alliance for Public Interest Technology, is NYU’s Designee to the Public Interest Technology University Network, and is President of the board at Data & Society Research Institute.
Amy Orben is a Group Leader at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit and Fellow of St. John’s College at the University of Cambridge. She completed her DPhil at the University of Oxford and MA at the University of Cambridge and now directs an internationally renowned research programme investigating the links between mental health and digital technology use in adolescence. Her work is supported by key national and international funders, charities and foundations, and she advises governments, health officials and public servants around the world, holding appointments on the UK government’s Department for Science, Innovation and Technology College of Experts and the British Academy Public Policy Committee. She has received a range of awards including the Medical Research Council Early Career Impact Prize (2022), British Psychological Society Award for Outstanding Contributions to Doctoral Research (2019), Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science Mission Award (2020), British Neuroscience Association Researcher Credibility Prize (2021) and UK Reproducibility Network Dorothy Bishop Early Career Researcher Prize (2022).
Rashik Parmar MBE is Group Chief Executive of BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT. His team are focussed on the value of professional membership, promoting digital skills and computing education, and building BCS’ reputation for insight on emerging technology such as AI and Quantum Computing. As a former VP Technology for IBM, he helped drive its European technical strategy with a focus on guiding companies through digital transformation. A Fellow of both IBM and BCS, Rashik was awarded the MBE for services to business and innovation.
Rashik is a Council Member at The Open University (OU), a Senior Independent Member and NERC Council Member at UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), and a Fellow at Digit Lab. He is also the Chair of the Board of Trustees at We are IVE, a charity helping young people improve their prospects in the creative industries. He serves as a Research Industry Advisory Board Member at Leeds University Business School. Rashik is a founder of Rangoli Radio, which serves the Hindu community.
Advisory Board Technology translations & industry engagement
Ann Phoenix is Professor of Psychosocial Studies at the Thomas Coram Research Unit, Department of Social Science, UCL Institute of Education. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Academy of Social Sciences. Her research focuses on the ways in which psychological experiences and social processes are linked and intersectional.
Professor Jack Qiu Linchuan is the Shaw Foundation Professor in Media Technology at Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, at Nanyang Technological University (Singapore). He works on issues of digital media and social change in relation to labor, class, globalisation, and sustainability, especially in the contexts of Asia (eg Asian media conglomerates) and the Global South. He has published more than 120 research articles and chapters and 10 books in both English and Chinese including Goodbye iSlave: A Manifesto for Digital Abolition (U of Illinois Press, 2016), World Factory in the Information Age (Guangxi Normal U Press, 2013), and Working-Class Network Society (MIT Press, 2009). His work has been translated into French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish.
Gabriela Ramos is the Assistant Director-General for the Social and Human Sciences of UNESCO, where she oversees the contributions of the institution to build inclusive and peaceful societies. Her agenda includes the achievement of social inclusion and gender equality, advancing youth development; promotion of values through sports; anti-racism and anti-discriminatory agenda and ethics of artificial intelligence. She formerly served as OECD Chief of Staff and Sherpa to the G20, G7, and APEC.
Advisory Board Community, policy & civil society engagement
Octavia Reeve is Associate Director (Impact & research practice) at the Ada Lovelace Institute. Her role connects research design to strategy, project planning, external outputs, impact and evaluation, ensuring that the Institute fulfils its commitment to make data and AI work for people and society.
Before joining the Ada Lovelace Institute, Octavia worked in the creative and cultural industries as a gallerist and artist studio manager, in publishing as a commissioning editor, and in the technology sector as a product manager. Most recently, she worked in higher education, leading on strategic content and impact at the Royal College of Art. She is also an advisory board member of the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project ‘Patterns in practice’ at the University of Sheffield.
Seán Ó Riain is Professor of Sociology at the National University of Ireland Maynooth. He studies workplace regimes, national development strategies and the politics of inequality. He is author of The Politics of High Tech Growth (Cambridge University Press, 2004), The Rise and Fall of Ireland’s Celtic Tiger (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and co-editor of The Changing Worlds and Workplaces of Capitalism (Springer, 2015).
Professor Chris Speed FRSE is Chair of Design Informatics at the University of Edinburgh and Director for the Edinburgh Futures Institute, involving the transformation of the 22,000m2 Old Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, a Florence Nightingale hospital in the centre of Edinburgh, into a world leading centre for interdisciplinary teaching, research and innovation.
Advisory Board Technology translations & industry engagement
Sharon Strover is the Philip G. Warner Regents Professor in Communication and co- director of the Technology and Information Policy Institute. Current research projects examine broadband networks; AI, surveillance technologies; libraries and digital literacy; and the digital divide. Sharon has worked with many government agencies, foundations,
and advisory groups on communications policy matters. She received her graduate degrees from Stanford University.
Advisory Board Community, policy & civil society engagement
Dan Sutch is Director of CAST, a charity that works to ensure the voice, presence and influence of civil society in the technologies that affect us all. CAST works with nonprofits, charities and funders to embed digital and design across their services, strategy and governance and works with sector leaders, funders and government to make this happen. CAST initiated and incubates Catalyst an ambitious collective of digital specialists, charities and funders dedicated to realising a digitally enabled and resilient social sector
Prior to co-founding CAST, Dan led the strategy at Nominet Trust, investing c£20m in ventures focused on using technology to address social challenges. Before that, he was Head of Development and Principle Researcher at edtech innovator Futurelab.
Advisory Board Community, policy & civil society engagement
Łukasz Szulc is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Media and Culture at the University of Manchester, specialising in critical and cultural studies of digital media at the intersections of gender, sexuality and transnationalism. The main focus of his work is Central and Eastern Europe, especially Poland.
Melissa Terras is Professor of Digital Cultural Heritage at the University of Edinburgh, UK. Her research interests include advanced digitisation techniques, usage of large-scale digitisation, and the mining and analysis of digitised content. She is an Alan Turing Institute Fellow and an Expert Advisor to DCMS.
Ingmar Weber is an Alexander von Humboldt Professor for AI and Chair for Societal Computing at Saarland University. In his interdisciplinary research he looks at how non-traditional data sources can be used to study societal processes, and how the gained insights can be used by non-profit partners for supporting social development.
Matthew Williams is Professor of Criminology in the School of Social Sciences at Cardiff University and Director of HateLab and the Social Data Science Lab. His main areas of research activity are Cybercrime, Human Factors in Cybersecurity, Hate Crime, Hate Speech and Extremism Online. To date he has been involved in 40 research projects, amounting to a grant capture of £14.5 million. He advises the Home Office, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, and the Office for National Statistics. He sat on HMG’s Cybercrime Reduction Partnership and currently sits on the Commission for Countering Extremism’s Academic Practitioner Network.
Advisory Board Digital society networking
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