Dr. Fay Cobb Payton is an award-winning researcher, international speaker and entrepreneur. She is a Special Advisor to the Chancellor for Inclusive Innovation, Professor (with Tenure) in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Rutgers University – Newark and an affiliate faculty in the Rutgers New Jersey Medical School. She is the director of the Institute for Data, Research and Innovation Science (IDRIS) at Rutgers University – Newark.
She is also Professor Emerita and was a Full Professor (with Tenure) of Information Technology/Analytics at North Carolina State University. She completed a rotation as a Program Director at the National Science Foundation where she initiated the CISE Minority Serving Institution Research Expansion Program, and worked on several initiatives, such as Smart Health and Biomedical Research in the Era of Artificial Intelligence and Advanced Data Science; AI Fairness, Equity, Accountability & Transparency; and Research Expansion and Cloud Computing with partnerships with Amazon, Google and Microsoft. She received the NSF Director’s Award during her rotation at the agency.
Dr. Payton is a member of the National Academics of Science, Engineering and Medicine’s Committee on Women in Science, Engineering and Medicine. She is a member of the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine Consensus Study on Transforming Trajectories: Women of Color in Tech dissemination team. She has published over 150 peer-reviewed journal articles, conference publications and book chapters on topics of data quality, AI bias/ethics, healthcare and innovation.
Dr. Payton worked in industry as an engineer, developer, and consultant prior to earning her doctoral degree. She serves on several advisory boards including the Association for Computing Machinery and is a Forbes AI Contributor. She is the author of Leveraging Intersectionality: Seeing and Not Seeing, and a board member, consultant, public and keynote speaker who has appeared on or cited in Scientific American, MIT Tech Review, Essence Magazine, Forbes, IEEE Spectrum, Aspen Institute, CBS Radio Network, Sunrise America, Financial Review, NPR and others.
She received the North Carolina Tech Association Educator of the Year and SAS Institute Fellow Awards for her teaching in the tech classroom. She has completed fellowships at the American Council on Education, Research Triangle Institute and National Institutes of Health.
She earned her Ph.D. in Information and Decision Systems from Case Western Reserve University. She is a graduate of Georgia Institute of Technology (BS – Industrial and Systems Engineering) and Clark Atlanta University (BA – Accounting and minor in Mathematics; MBA – Decision Systems).