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Dr. Rediet Abebe commands respect across two of the most selective institutions in American academia, dividing her career between the University of California, Berkeley, where she holds a faculty position in electrical engineering and computer science, and Harvard University, where she made history as a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows.
Abebe's work sits at the intersection of algorithms, artificial intelligence, and inequality, a research field she helped build from the ground up rather than simply join. Her contributions have earned her a place on MIT Technology Review's 35 Innovators Under 35, a spot on the Bloomberg 50 as a name to watch, the ACM SIGKDD Dissertation Award, and a 2022 Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, cementing her as one of the most closely watched scientists working on equity in technology today.
How It Happened
Born and raised in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Abebe was educated under the Ethiopian National Curriculum at Nazareth School before winning a competitive scholarship to attend the International Community School of Addis Ababa. She moved to the United States for university, earning a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Harvard in 2013 and a master's in applied mathematics from Harvard in 2015, before pursuing her PhD in computer science at Cornell University under advisor Jon Kleinberg. In December 2019, she defended a thesis titled "Designing Algorithms for Social Good" and became the first Black woman to earn a computer science PhD in Cornell's history.
That same year, Abebe was inducted into the Harvard Society of Fellows, a highly selective fellowship founded in 1933 that supports early career scholars across disciplines. She became the first female computer scientist and the first Black computer scientist ever selected in the Society's 86 year history at that point, and only the second Junior Fellow overall to hold a computer science PhD.
Alongside her fellowship, Abebe co-founded Black in AI in 2017 to address representation gaps in artificial intelligence, and later co-launched Mechanism Design for Social Good (MD4SG), a research initiative applying algorithmic and economic tools to problems like poverty, housing access, and healthcare equity. She now holds a faculty position at UC Berkeley, where her research continues to model how income shocks and systemic gaps trap communities in cycles of poverty, work she designs specifically to inform real policy rather than sit in academic journals.
Why it Matters
Abebe's rise inside Harvard's oldest fellowship society proves that the people building the algorithms shaping global economic life do not have to come exclusively from the institutions and demographics that have always held that power. But the fact that a fellowship running since 1933 needed 86 years to induct its first female computer scientist exposes exactly how narrow that gatekeeping has been, even at an institution that considers itself among the most meritocratic on earth.
