Dr. Fay Cobb Payton
Faycobb.payton@rutgers.edu
Dr. Fay Cobb Payton is a Special Advisor to the Chancellor for Innovation, (tenured) Full 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 also is the Tech Scout Lead for the iCorps Northeastern Innovation Network.
She is a Professor Emerita (with Tenure) 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 where she initiated the CISE Research Expansion Program, and worked on several initiatives, such as INCLUDES, 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.
Dr. Payton has worked in industry as an engineer, developer and consultant at IBM, EY and Time Inc. She is a Forbes AI Contributor. She earned her Ph.D. in Information and Decision Systems from Case Western Reserve University with an emphasis in Health Systems, an MBA in Decision Science from Clark Atlanta University, a BS in Industrial and Systems Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology and a BA in Accounting from Clark Atlanta University. She is a workshop developer/facilitator, keynote speaker and consultant for industry, nonprofit and higher education organizations with a focus on technology impacts, ecosystems collaborations, public-private partnerships and data utilization.