Our Team

Beth Simone Noveck is a professor at Northeastern University, where she directs the Burnes Center for Social Change and its partner project, The Governance Lab (The GovLab). She is faculty at the Institute for Experiential AI, School of Law, and in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities, the College of Arts, Design, and Media, the College of Engineering, and affiliated faculty at the Khoury College of Computer Sciences. 

Beth’s work focuses on using AI to reimagine participatory democracy and strengthen governance, and she has spent her career helping institutions incorporate more equitable and open ways of working using new technology. Her newest book Democracy Rebooted: How AI Can Save Democracy will appear with Yale University Press,

Among her many civic technology projects, she created Unchat, one of the first online platforms for democratic deliberation, Peer-to-Patent to connect scientists to policymakers to improve the patent process, The Cairns Project for citizen co-creation, and two decades before the Metaverse, she built Democracy Island in Second Life to test out new ways for people to engage with one another civically online.

Today, she leads the GovLab’s InnovateUS initiative, which trains public sector professionals in AI, digital and innovation skills. 

Beth has been working with students to build technology for social good. She launched Northeastern’s new AI for Impact Co-Op, building on twenty years of experience teaching experiential civic technology clinics. Beth is the founder of open, online courses such as Solving Public Problems, which has helped social innovators in over 100 countries take a project from idea to implementation and Open Justice for legal innovators.

Previously, Beth served in the White House as the first United States Deputy Chief Technology Officer under President Obama. She founded the White House Open Government Initiative, which created policies and platforms, such as data.gov and challenge.gov, for making the federal government more transparent, participatory, and collaborative. 

She served as senior advisor for Open Government for UK Prime Minister David Cameron, and between 2018-2021, she served on Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Digital Council.

Appointed the State of New Jersey’s first Chief AI Strategist by Governor Phil Murphy, she previously served as the state’s Chief Innovation Officer (2018-2024). The Office of Innovation uses new technology to improve equitable  delivery of government services. The Office has worked with partner agencies to modernize unemployment insurance, provide a whole-of-government response to COVID, collect real-time infection data, deliver everything needed to start, run and grow a business, and use open data to provide training information to job seekers and improve uptake of benefits, services and permits. She also serves as Co-Chair of the State’s AI Taskforce and previous led the State’s Future of Work Task Force

She is also the author of three earlier books, Solving Public Problems: How to Fix Our Government and Change Our World (Yale Press 2021) was named a Best Book of the year by Stanford Social Innovation Review.

She was named one of the “Foreign Policy 100” by Foreign Policy, one of Fast Company’s “100 Most Creative People in Business”, a “Top Women in Technology” by Huffington Post, and one of the World’s 100 Most Influential Academics in Government by Apolitical. She was awarded a doctorat honoris causa by the University of Geneva. Her TED talk is here, her publications can be found below and she blogs at RebootDemocracy.ai.