Fay Cobb Payton, PhD

Fay Cobb Payton, PhD, MBA, is a consultant, thought leader and a Visiting Scholar and Special Advisor to the Chancellor for Inclusive Innovation at Rutgers University – Newark. She is also a Professor Emerita at North Carolina State University where she was Full Professor (with Tenure) of Information Technology/Analytics and was named a University Faculty Scholar for her leadership in turning research into solutions to society’s most pressing issues.

She completed a rotation as a Program Director at the National Science Foundation (NSF) in the Computer, Information Sciences and Engineering (CISE) Directorate. At NSF, she initiated the CISE Minority Serving Institution Research Expansion Program and worked on several initiatives, such as INCLUDES, ADVANCE, Smart Health and Biomedical Research in the Era of Artificial Intelligence and Advanced Data Science; AI Fairness, Equity, Accountability & Transparency Dear Colleague Letter; Research Expansion and Cloud Computing Dear Colleague Letter with partnerships with Amazon, Google and Microsoft; HBCU Excellence in Research; and NSF Research Traineeship (NRT). She received the NSF Director’s Award in 2020.

She is the co-chair DEI Committee for the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Education Board and a member of the ACM Diversity Council. She was an American Council on Education (ACE) Fellow and worked with higher education leaders from the United States and Ghana on strategic collaborations and public-private partners and now serves on the ACE Council of Fellows. She is a member of the National Academics of Science, Engineering and Medicine’s Committee on Advancing Anti-Racism, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in STEM Organizations. She led to the NSF funding and support of the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine Women of Color in Tech Consensus Report.

Having published over 150 peer-reviewed manuscripts and conference proceedings, Dr. Payton’s research explores AI bias and data quality/curation which impacts health equity and disparities, talent management, and tech innovation along with ecosystems shaping lived experiences. She has presented her research in leading US conferences and those in China, Nigeria, Canada, United Kingdom, Ghana and other international locations.

She worked in the tech industry as a consultant, programmer and systems engineer at EY, IBM and Time Inc. She is the author of "Leveraging Intersectionality: Seeing and Not Seeing." She serves on several advisory boards in the higher education, computing and tech sectors.