Our Team

Erhardt Graeff is an educator, social scientist, public interest technologist, and public official. He is a Senior Fellow at the Burnes Center for Social Change and Visiting Faculty at Northeastern University, supporting InnovateMA and the AI for Impact Co-op program. He works on the design and use of technology for civic engagement, civic learning, and social justice, and on the ethical responsibility of technologists as stewards of democracy.

His current research is on articulating the responsibilities of engineers as citizens and developing new forms of civic education within undergraduate engineering. His pedagogy is organized around creating spaces for student-owned and -led public interest technology projects.

Erhardt is an Associate Professor of Social and Computer Science at Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering (on sabbatical 2024–25), a Visiting Fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University (2024–25), and a faculty associate at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. He holds a PhD in Media Arts and Sciences from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Beyond academia, he serves in local elected office as chair of the Trustees of the Needham Free Public Library and a member of Needham, Massachusetts’s Town Meeting.