Our Team

Dr. Amanda Welsh is Faculty Affiliate at the Burnes Center for Social Change and a Professor of the Practice at the College of Professional Studies within the Doctor of Law and Policy program. At the Burnes Center, she supports InnovateUS in leveraging skillstech and AI to evaluate and validate the impact of InnovateUS training.

Amanda also leads Project 9, a unique interdisciplinary collaboration that uses commercial consumer measurement data to shape and scale public policy.

Prior to joining Northeastern, Amanda worked for 25 years in the intersection of media and consumer behavior tracking.  She is an experienced executive with a demonstrated history of achievements in the information services industry, co-founding Garageband.com and IMMI as well as developing successful programs at Google and the Nielsen Company.

In addition to her professional responsibilities, Amanda is active in the non-profit world as Executive Director for The Foundation for Scholarly Culture, an organization that develops social innovation projects in Africa. 

Amanda is proud to have served on the Board of Directors for Raising a Reader, a US literacy and family engagement program that has brought a love of books to over 1 million children and to have sponsored pro-bono projects through Nielsen’s corporate social responsibility function, including a multi-year engagement with the World Food Programme to create a mobile data collection solution for food-insecurity reporting.

Amanda earned a Ph.D in Linguistics and a Masters in English from Harvard University, and a BFA from NYU. Early adventures include data collection fieldwork in developing countries in the Pacific, designing award-winning videogames and writing a book on data privacy. In her free time, Amanda enjoys doing the New York Times Spelling Bee.