Sabbatical year doing federal policy work

If you’ve emailed me since August, you may have noticed in my auto-reply some exciting career-related developments. For my sabbatical year, I am a Science & Technology Policy Fellow (that’s me in that page’s photo, 4th row back near the center, donning a red tie) with the American Association for the Advancement of Science. This fellowship has me working in the National Science Foundation’s National Aritificial Intelligence Research Institutes. In this post, I want to briefly explain what that position entails.

First of all, the federal US government is massive, so in case you’re unfamiliar, just three sentences describing the placement. The NSF is a federal agency on par with the Department of State, Department of Energy, and so on. The AAAS is a professional science advocacy organization, and their S&TP Fellowship is one of the most prestigious policy fellowships in the world.

The position is really cool. I’m dedicating most of my hours to helping the AI Institutes Virtual Organization (AIVO) implement NSF’s policy recommendations around supporting the 25 AI Institutes funded by the department I mentioned earlier. AIVO was set up to build closer collaborations and networks between those 25 Institutes, rather than have each Institute function as an island. I’m chairing two committees that help fund workshops and international collaborations, writing reports that draw out policy lessons coming out of our events, and helping to support and organize events that have taken me both to the Senate Office Building and to the Summit for AI Institutes Leadership in Atlanta. While most of the work has been around policy implementation, there has also been a high degree of program envisioning: trying to think of creative, rigorous, responsible ways to actually implement priorities, formulate programs that equitably distribute resources, and trying in my own surreptitious ways to nudge the AI Institutes to more deeply grapple with environmental and societal issues of AI.

There’s also been great opportunity to do “extracurricular” activities related to science & policy. I renewed and chair the Science, Technology, and Society Affinity Group of AAAS Fellows, for instance, where we discuss ways STS research can inform policymaking. I’ve been an acive member of the NSF’s Faculty of Fellows (a congress of sorts of AAAS fellows at NSF), and just last week went to a mini-conference organized by one of the Institutes, “Data Governance in the Age of Generative AI”.

Why did I pursue this fellowship? Well, I’ve had my eye on this fellowship since I was a PhD student because I’ve always wanted to have clear public impacts with my scholarship. Working in the “halls of power” takes my experience of “studying up” as a social scientist and actively places me in contexts where I can implement (in small ways) some of the critiques I’ve always made. It’s a very tangible “impact” in my work. This is why public policy has always been a core element of my research program: from working with community associations, to collaborating with the City of Calgary, to co-chairing one of the task forces of the Alberta Non-profit Data Strategy. I see this fellowship as a clear way to put my program management skills to the test, and to home my high-level leadership. So many of my amazing colleagues across the academy collaborate with activist groups, mutual aid groups, non-profits, and racial justice groups, and I deeply admire and respect their impacts, and I hope that my work can complement the work they do.

Reach out if you’d like to discuss this work, the impacts we AAAS fellows are having, or how it advances my career objectives!