Please join Professor Ruha Benjamin and Toni Townes-Whitley ’85 for “A Conversation on Equity, Ethics and Technology.”
Bios:
Toni Townes-Whitley ’85, is the President, U.S. Regulated Industries, Microsoft. Toni leads Microsoft’s U.S. sales strategy for driving digital transformation across customers and partners within the public sector and commercial regulated industries. She is one of the leading women at Microsoft and in the technology industry, with a track record for accelerating and sustaining profitable business and building high-performance teams.
Toni serves on the boards of the PNC Financial Services Group, the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, the Partnership for Public Service, the Princeton University Faith and Work Initiative, as well as the board of trustees for the United Way Worldwide. She is an advisor to the Women’s Center of Northern Virginia, and a past president and chair of Women in Technology.
Toni continues to support the U.S. Peace Corps, for which she volunteered for three years as a village teacher in Gabon, and has helped launch new initiatives at Microsoft with the Athena Alliance and Gender Fair — which, respectively, prepare women for corporate board roles and rate companies on their fairness practices for leadership, employee policies, advertising and philanthropy.
Ruha Benjamin is a professor in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University. Ruha specializes in the interdisciplinary study of science, medicine, and technology; race-ethnicity and gender; knowledge and power. She is author of People’s Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier(link is external) (Stanford University Press 2013), Race After Technology (link is external) (Polity 2019), and editor of Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life(link is external) (Duke University Press 2019), as well as numerous articles and book chapters.
She received her BA in sociology and anthropology from Spelman College, MA and Ph.D. in sociology from UC Berkeley, and completed postdoctoral fellowships at UCLA’s Institute for Society and Genetics and Harvard University’s Science, Technology, and Society Program. She has been awarded fellowships and grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, National Science Foundation, Ford Foundation, California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, and Institute for Advanced Study. In 2017, she received the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton.