Rachel (Rae) Walker, PhD, RN, FAAN

Dr. Rae Walker is a nurse scientist and Registered Nurse with over 16 years of experience including oncology and gerontological nursing in both hospital and home-based settings, rural cancer patient navigation, and disaster response. Following service in the U.S. Peace Corps in Mali, West Africa, they completed their nursing training, PhD, Certificates in Nursing Education and Health Inequities, and a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. They were an inaugural member of the American Nurses Association’s Innovation Advisory Board and the only nurse Invention Ambassador for the American Association for the Advancement of Science. As a Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing and Co-Chair of the Nursing Education and Artificial Intelligence Task Force, they inform national policy via service on Expert Panels for Health Equity, Nursing Informatics and Technology, and LGBTQ+ Health. They currently direct the Nursing PhD Program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where they are Associate Director for the IALS Center for Personalized Monitoring and co-founder of Health Tech for the People, a multidisciplinary research group focused on tech ethics and accountable design. They teach courses on data narratives, health measurement and power, and their scholarship focuses on community-directed health innovation, and digital defense against technologies and data regimes that may cause harm. Their advocacy more inclusive and care worker-informed invention ecosystems has been featured on podcasts, the TEDx stage, and in magazines such as Forbes, Scientific American, Science and on NPR.