Dr. Fay Cobb Payton is an award-winning researcher, international speaker and entrepreneur.  She is a Professor Emerita and was a Full Professor (with Tenure) of Information Technology/Analytics at North Carolina State University.  She is currently a Visiting Scholar of Inclusive Innovation at Rutgers University - Newark.

She completed a rotation as a Program Director at the National Science Foundation where she initiated the CISE Minority Serving Institution Research Expansion Program, and worked on several initiatives, such as Smart Health and Biomedical Research in the Era of Artificial Intelligence and Advanced Data Science; AI Fairness, Equity, Accountability & Transparency; and Research Expansion and Cloud Computing with partnerships with Amazon, Google and Microsoft. She received the NSF Director’s Award during her rotation at the agency.

Dr. Payton worked in industry as an engineer, developer and consultant prior to earning her doctoral degree. She serves on advisory boards of the ACM and ASEE, and is a Forbes AI Contributor. She is the author of Leveraging Intersectionality: Seeing and Not Seeing, and a board member, consultant, public and keynote speaker who has appeared on or cited in Scientific American, MIT Tech Review, Essence Magazine, Forbes, IEEE Spectrum, Aspen Institute, CBS Radio Network, Sunrise America, Financial Review, NPR and others.