[Eril-l] Alondra Nelson Is the Winner of the 2026 Miles Conrad Award

[Electronic Resources in Libraries discussion list]

**Apologies for cross posting**

Baltimore, MD | October 28, 2025 — The National Information Standards
Organization (NISO) is pleased to announce that Alondra Nelson, Harold F.
Linder Chair in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced
Study, is our 2026 Miles Conrad Awardee. The award is named for the founder
of the National Federation of Abstracting and Indexing Services (NFAIS),
which merged with NISO in 2019,  and recognizes distinguished lifetime
achievement in moving us toward a world where all can benefit from the
unfettered exchange of information. Dr. Nelson will receive the award and
deliver the Miles Conrad Lecture on February 17 during the 2026 NISO Plus
conference <http://niso.plus/> in Baltimore.

During the Biden administration, Dr. Nelson served as deputy assistant to
the president and acting director and principal deputy director for science
and society in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy
(OSTP). In this role, she was instrumental in the development of White
House policy on artificial intelligence, leading work on the “Blueprint for
a Bill of AI Rights.” Under her leadership, the OSTP also developed
national policy to make federally funded research publicly available upon
publication and advanced federal scientific integrity guidelines. Her
tenure at the OSTP led to her inclusion in the Nature’s 10 list in 2022,
and in 2023, she was named one of TIME’s 100 most influential people in AI.

Dr. Nelson’s academic research focuses on science, technology, and society,
particularly on race, inequality, and emerging science and technologies.
Her book publications include The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations,
and Reconciliation After the Genome (a 2016 Favorite Book of the Wall
Street Journal), and she has also contributed to Science, PLOS
Computational Biology, PLOS Medicine, Genetics in Medicine, the Proceedings
of the International Conference on Machine Learning, and the American
Journal of Public Health. Among her many accolades are the MIT Morison
Prize, the NAACP-Archewell Digital Civil Rights Award, and the Sage-Center
for Advanced Study’s Behavioral Science Award from Stanford University.

Dr. Nelson holds a BA in anthropology from the University of California,
San Diego, a PhD in American Studies from New York University, and several
honorary degrees. Prior to her role at the Institute for Advanced Study,
she was dean and founder of Columbia University’s Social Sciences Division
as well as professor at Yale University.

Todd Carpenter, NISO’s Executive Director, stated, “We are honored to
recognize Dr. Nelson’s contributions to the information community at the
NISO Plus Baltimore Conference. Her work to advance equity and help ensure
technology safely and effectively serves all has become even more critical
with the rapid development of AI technologies and their adoption. We are
very much looking forward to hearing her lecture as we gather to consider
the latest challenges and opportunities in scholarly communications.”

*About NISO*

Based in Baltimore, MD, NISO’s mission is to build knowledge, foster
discussion, and advance authoritative standards development through
collaboration among the cultural, scholarly, scientific, and professional
communities. To fulfill this mission, NISO engages with libraries,
publishers, information aggregators, and other organizations that support
learning, research, and scholarship through the creation, organization,
management, and curation of knowledge. NISO works with intersecting
communities of interest and across the entire life cycle of information
standards. NISO is a not-for-profit association accredited by the American
National Standards Institute (ANSI). For more information, visit the NISO
website (https://niso.org) or contact us at nisohq at niso.org.



NISO
3600 Clipper Mill Road, Suite 302
Baltimore, MD 21211
Phone: 301.654.2512
E-mail: nisohq at niso.org
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