Dr. Fay Cobb Payton is a Special Advisor to the Chancellor for Innovation, Ful Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at Rutgers University – Newark and an affiliate faculty in the Rutgers New Jersey Medical School. She is the inaugural Executive Director of the Institute for Data, Research and Innovation Science (IDRIS) at Rutgers University – Newark.
She is also Professor Emerita and was a Full Professor of Information Technology/Analytics at North Carolina State University. She completed a rotation as a Program Director at the National Science Foundation (NSF) where she initiated the CISE 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.
She serves (or served) on several boards and committees, including the National Academics of Science, Engineering and Medicine, National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource Pilot, Georgia Institute of Technology Industrial & Systems Engineering Advisory, Association for Computing Machinery and others. She has published over 150 peer-reviewed journal articles, conference publications and book chapters on topics of data quality, responsible AI, healthcare and innovation.