Dr. Safiya Umoja Noble to Receive NISO’s 2023 Miles Conrad Award

The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) today announced that Dr. Safiya Umoja Noble, Professor of Gender Studies and African American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), will be the recipient of the 2023 Miles Conrad Award, a lifetime achievement award for those working in the information community. 

Dr. Noble is an internet studies scholar, whose work is both sociological and interdisciplinary, focusing on the ways that digital media intersects with issues of race, gender, culture, power, and technology. She is the author of Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (NYU Press), a best-selling book on racist and sexist algorithmic bias in commercial search engines, and she has written and spoken widely on issues of discrimination and technology bias, including for The Guardian, the BBC, CNN International, USA Today, Wired, Time, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, The New York Times, and a host of network news and podcasts. 

In 2021, Dr. Noble was recognized as a MacArthur Foundation Fellow (also known as the “Genius Award”) for her ground-breaking work on algorithmic discrimination, and in 2022, she was the inaugural recipient of the NAACP-Archewell Digital Civil Rights Award. She is the Founder and Director of the recently launched Center on Race and Digital Justice — a groundbreaking effort that focuses on accountability and repair from extant and emerging digital harms. She is also the Co-Founder and former Director of the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry (C2i2) and current Co-Director of the Minderoo Initiative on Technology & Power. Dr. Noble is a board member of both the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI), serving those vulnerable to online harassment, the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, America’s Black think tank, and Color of Change, a civil rights advocacy organization. In 2021, she founded a non-profit, the Equity Engine, to accelerate investment in companies, education, and networks driven by women of color.

Dr. Noble holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in Library & Information Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a B.A. in Sociology from California State University, Fresno where she was awarded the Distinguished Alumni Award for 2018. In 2020, she was awarded the Distinguished Alumna Award from the iSchool Alumni Association, and she is also the inaugural Diversity and Inclusion Award winner from the Illinois Alumni Association at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is the recipient of a Hellman Fellowship and the UCLA Early Career Award.

The Miles Conrad Award ceremony and lecture will take place during the NISO Plus 2023 conference, held virtually, from 12.30pm ET on February 15, 2023. For more information about the conference, please visit https://niso.plus.  

“We are delighted to recognize Dr. Noble’s contributions to the information community — and society more widely — through this well-deserved award,” said Todd Carpenter, NISO’s Executive Director. “As an information scientist with a deep understanding of the intersections among culture, race, and gender, her work on issues of algorithmic discrimination and technology bias is shining a much-needed light on the need for greater accountability and regulation of tech companies, especially search engines. Dr. Noble joins a long and distinguished list of Miles Conrad awardees and we very much look forward to her lecture at the NISO Plus 2023 conference.”  

About the Miles Conrad Award

Miles Conrad was one of the founders of the National Federation of Abstracting and Indexing Services (NFAIS), and this award was established in 1965 in his memory. During the 1960s, Conrad encouraged NFAIS members — scholarly societies and government agencies — to work collaboratively in support of the space exploration program, in order to enhance the speed with which scientific knowledge could be disseminated, discovered, and acted upon. In the years that followed, NFAIS expanded its cross-disciplinary membership and played an important role in the development of online information services and resources, before merging with National Information Standards Organization (NISO) in 2019. NISO’s vision, of a world where all can benefit from the unfettered exchange of information, reflects the aims of both organizations; in awarding this prize, we are proud to continue recognizing the contributions of those whose lifetime achievements have moved our community forward. A list of previous Miles Conrad Award winners is available on the NISO website: https://www.niso.org/awards/MCA. 

About NISO

Based in Baltimore, MD, NISO fosters the development and maintenance of standards that facilitate the creation, persistent management, and effective interchange of information so that it can be trusted for use in research and learning. To fulfill this mission, NISO engages 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 lifecycle 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@niso.org