[1] In October 2023, she was nominated by the Biden-Harris Administration and appointed by United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres to the UN High-Level Advisory Body on Artificial Intelligence.

[6] Prior to her role in the Biden Administration, she served for four years as president and CEO of the Social Science Research Council, an independent, nonpartisan international nonprofit organization.

Nelson was previously professor of sociology at Columbia University, where she served as the inaugural Dean of Social Science,[7] as well as director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender.

[22] She left the Columbia University faculty in June 2019 to assume the Harold F. Linder chair and professorship at the Institute for Advanced Study,[23] "the Princeton, New Jersey, organization that once housed the likes of Albert Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer.

"[24] In February 2017, the Social Science Research Council board of directors announced its selection of Nelson as the 94-year old organization's fourteenth president and CEO, succeeding Ira Katznelson.

She has been a member of the World Economic Forum Network on AI, the Internet of Things, and the Future of Trust, and the Council on Big Data, Ethics, and Society.

In this interim role, Nelson led "OSTP's six policy divisions in their work to advance critical administration priorities, including groundbreaking clean energy investments; a people's Bill of Rights for automated technologies; a national strategy for STEM equity; appointment of the nation's Chief Technology Officer; data-driven guidance for implementing the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law; a transformative, life-saving Community Connected Health initiative; and programs to ensure the U.S. remains a magnet for the world's top innovators and scientists.

She co-chaired the Equitable Data Working Group,[52] a body that was established by President Biden by Executive Order 13985, Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government, and co-authored its report.

On October 8, 2021, Nelson co-authored an op-ed with OSTP Director Eric Lander announcing a policy planning process for the creation of an "AI Bill of Rights."

[65][66] In October 2023, she was nominated by the White House, and then appointed by United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, to serve on the UN High-level Advisory Body on Artificial Intelligence.

[69] "At its core, her philosophy was that focusing solely on those communities' exclusion not just misread the past, but shriveled the future possibilities innovation holds for them," Politico noted.

[71] In 2001, with co-authors, Nelson contributed a chapter to, and co-edited - with Thuy Linh N. Tu - Technicolor: Race, Technology and Everyday Life, one of the first scholarly works to examine the racial politics of contemporary technoculture.

Noting the racial stereotyping work of the "digital divide" concept, she writes, "Blackness gets constructed as always oppositional to technologically driven chronicles of progress.

"[75] She continued, "Forecasts of a race-free (to some) utopian future and pronouncements of the dystopian digital divide are the predominant discourses of blackness and technology in the public sphere.

[82] With co-authors, Nelson contributed chapters to, and co-edited - with Keith Wailoo and Catherine Lee - Genetics and the Unsettled Past: The Collision of DNA, Race, and History, published in 2012.

[85] Kirkus Reviews described Nelson's book about the uses of genetic ancestry testing in Black communities, as a "meticulously detailed" work that "adds another chapter to the somber history of injustice toward African-Americans, but... one in which science is enriching lives by forging new identities and connections to ancestral homelands.

[89] Nelson's writing and commentary have appeared in The New York Times,[90] The Washington Post,[91] Foreign Affairs,[92] The Boston Globe,[93] The Guardian (London),[94] and The Chronicle of Higher Education,[95] among other publications.