Dr. Shelly Steward is a sociologist focused on the intersection of work and technology. She is currently Chief Research Officer at The Workers Lab. She applies participatory action methods, engaging and empowering workers as researchers to study the changing nature of work, including the gig economy, automation, and AI. She is the former director of the Aspen Institute Future of Work Initiative and was a postdoctoral researcher with the Fairwork Project based at the Oxford Internet Institute. She has been a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow, a Kinder Scholar at Rice University, and an Assessment and Evaluation Fellow at UC Berkeley. Her research has been published in the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, the Journal of Consumer Culture, and the Berkeley Journal of Sociology, and she has been quoted in major publications including the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and NPR. She holds a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley and an AB from Harvard. Prior to becoming a sociologist, she was a middle school science teacher.