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I am a legal academic who thinks about “technologies” understood very broadly. Half of my work deals with communications and the internet, on matters such as privacy, pervasive computing, and virtual communities. The other half deals with civil rights and race, which I view as a social-cognitive technology that I’m trying to hack. I’m probably best known for my work and talks on implicit bias.

Jerry Kang seated on gray and blue couch with fingers crossed

I was also the Founding Vice Chancellor for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion at UCLA (2015-20), who built up a new platform for accountability and fairness at UCLA. I did this in the era of #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo movements, hyper-partisanship, free speech conflicts, and COVID-19.

My research, service, and consulting share a core mission — to hold ourselves accountable to our professed ideals. That requires rigor to challenge our complacency, especially when we think we’re already doing the right thing. It also requires going beyond mere criticism to providing useful solutions, whether they be in terms of concepts, doctrines, policies, practices, or redesigns. The mission’s success must be measured through real change even if it is iterative.