Bio

Rae Walker (they/them) is an Associate Professor, Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing, and the first and only nurse to be selected as an Invention Ambassador for the American Association for the Advancement of Science. They direct the Nursing PhD Program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and serve as an Associate Director of the Center for Personalized Health Monitoring, a translational science center specializing in critical analysis and co-creation of A.I., sensors, and mHealth. Following service in the U.S. Peace Corps-Mali, they completed their nursing training, PhD, Certificates in Nursing Education and Health Inequities, and a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Johns Hopkins University. They teach courses on data narratives, measurement, and power, and their scholarship focuses on community-directed health innovation and digital defense against technologies and data regimes that cause harm. In 2021, they received the Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, the university’s highest distinction for teaching excellence. The national LGBTQ+ publication GO Magazine named them to the 2019 Class of “100 [People] We Love”. Their advocacy for nurse-led innovation, design justice and more inclusive invention ecosystems has been featured on numerous podcasts, on the TEDx stage, and in magazines such as Forbes, Scientific American, Science and on NPR.