Dr Heather Ford is an ARC Future Fellow and Professor in the School of Communications at UTS. She is the Coordinator of the UTS Data and AI Ethics Cluster, Affiliate of the UTS Data Science Institute, and Associate of the UTS Centre for Media Transition. She was appointed to the International Panel on the Information Environment (IPIE) in 2023 and is currently conducting research funded by the Australian Research Council and the Wikimedia Foundation on Wikipedia bias, question and answering technologies, digital literacy and the impact of generative AI on our information environment. She has a background working for global technology corporations and non-profits in the US, UK, South Africa and Kenya. A former Google Policy Fellow at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, former Executive Director of iCommons and co-founder of Creative Commons South Africa, her research focuses on the social implications of media technologies and the ways in which they might be better designed to prevent misinformation, social exclusion, and harms as a result of algorithmic bias. 

Heather completed her DPhil (PhD) at the Oxford Internet Institute at Oxford University. She has a Masters in Information Management and Systems (MIMS) from the University of California, Berkeley iSchool and has worked as a fellow at Leeds University, Stanford University, as a Google Policy Fellow and as a researcher at the University of the Witwatersrand LINK Center. Before her postdoctoral studies, she worked for a number of non-profit technology organisations including the Association for Progressive Communications, Creative Commons, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Privacy International and Ushahidi. She was the Executive Director of iCommons, a global non-profit organisation started by Creative Commons between 2006 and 2008. She has been on the advisory and executive boards of the Wikimedia Foundation, iCommons and The African Commons Project where she worked towards the goal of fairer, more flexible intellectual property provisions for the Internet, particularly in developing countries. She is passionate about using creative methods in the social sciences to reimagine future technologies. 

She has published in a variety of journals including Big Data and Society, New Media and Society, the International Journal of Communications, Social Studies of Science and a number of Advanced Computer Machinery (ACM) journals. She is a founder editor of ethnographymatters.net and reviews articles for a number of journals and conferences in the fields of science and technology studies, media and communication and media ethics.