Okolo speaking on a Brookings Institution panel with the Michelle Donelan, the U.K.’s former secretary of state for science, innovation and technology (far left). Above, Okolo’s collection of awards and plaques in her Washington, D.C., office.
Centered on a shelf in her Washington, D.C., office is the plaque Chinasa T. Okolo ’18 received nearly a decade ago from the Office of Black Student Affairs of The Claremont Colleges.
“Recognizing Genius in Our Community,” her 2015 First-Year Student Award reads.
Okolo, a former computer science major by way of Kansas City, Missouri, holds dear her time at Pomona, crediting her liberal arts education and professors for igniting in her a desire to understand human-computer interaction.
Now an expert in artificial intelligence (AI) after years of postgraduate and professional research, Okolo recently landed on Time Magazine’s list of The 100 Most Influential People in AI.
“With the education I received at Pomona,” Okolo says, “I’ve been able to leverage my skills and understanding of how technology, particularly AI, can impact and is impacting marginalized populations in the U.S. and globally. A lot of times this kind of work doesn’t get too much attention, so I’m very grateful to have been included on the list.”
As a fellow for the Brookings Institution, Okolo advocates for responsible AI adoption and governance across the Global South. At Brookings, her research includes analyzing datafication and algorithmic marginalization in Africa.
In recent months, Okolo has been quoted in The New York Times and The Washington Post, and she has appeared in segments on Voice of America, the country’s largest international broadcaster.
This summer, TechCrunch published a Q&A with Okolo as part of its “Women in AI” series on “remarkable women who’ve contributed to the AI revolution.”
“This AI boom has given me an opportunity to show the necessity of AI literacy,” Okolo says. “People are very enamored with the possibilities of AI, but don’t understand implications around bias and inequality.”
In addition to appearing in print and broadcast media, Okolo has been a guest speaker this year at international conferences and workshops in Senegal, South Africa, Brazil, Turkey, Belgium and the United Arab Emirates.
Well before she started trotting the globe, Okolo studied abroad in Hungary while at Pomona. Having never been out of the country before her semester away, Okolo says her maiden international trip “gave me the comfortability as a global citizen … and was a launching point to me visiting different countries throughout my career.”
Alexandra Papoutsaki, associate professor of computer science, met Okolo as a first-year professor in 2017 and found her inquisitive, methodical and thoughtful in how she approached researching human-computer interaction—and, particularly, the inclusivity issues certain technologies create for people of color.
Less than a decade later, Papoutsaki is astounded by—and proud of—Okolo’s rise.
“She’s been published very prolifically by some of the most competitive venues in our area,” Papoutsaki says. “She’s great at going out there and disseminating information publicly. She’s absolutely an emerging leader in tech in general, not just AI. She’s a person who’s able to build relationships with industry, NGOs and academia.”
In her first year as a Ph.D. student at Cornell, Okolo sent Papoutsaki a postcard from New York.
Papoutsaki still has it in her office.
“It’s remarkable that someone that young is able to do what she’s doing,” Papoutsaki says. “Chinasa is the absolute embodiment of how remarkable our students can be, how they can excel while at Pomona, but also take what we give them and do so much more once they graduate.”