our team

Lisa S. Nelson is associate professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh. She is a Fellow at the Philosophy of Science Center and an affiliated faculty member of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. She holds a PhD and J.D. from the University of Wisconsin‐Madison and specializes in the field of science, technology, and society. She was a co‐principal investigator on a National Science Foundation grant to explore the societal perceptions of biometric technology.  This research is published in America Identified: Biometric Technology and Society (MIT, 2011). She has also written several articles in journals including I/S: A Journal of Law and Policy for the Information Society, Public Administration Review, and the University of Chicago Policy Review. Nelson has also been the recipient of a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur grant.

From 2011-2013 she was appointed to the Department of Homeland Security’s Data Privacy and Integrity Committee.  Her current research explores social networking technologies and considers fundamental questions about information ethics and its enforcement on the Internet in an open society, providing a historical, theoretical, cultural, and legal discussion of the new “frontier” of the digital age.  This research is published in Social Media and Morality: Are we Losing our Self Control (Cambridge University Press, 2018).  She is currently working on a project on censorship and social media, funded in part by the Institute on Free Speech and Open Inquiry.