Cheryl L. Brown, Ph.D. is Chair and Associate Professor of the Department of Political Science and Public Administration; a faculty affiliate of the School of Data Science, Social Aspects of Health Initiative, and CyberDNA Center; and a member of the AI Center for Human Digital Twin and Computational Health and the Center for TAIMing AI of UNC Charlotte. Dr. Brown teaches courses on Chinese domestic and foreign policy, East Asian foreign policy, global to local governance and cooperation of Artificial Intelligence, digital twin technology and AI policy, and designed and introduced the department’s initial Cyberspace and Politics course in 1999. She received her B.A. degree in Political Science at the University of Florida, and her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Political Science (specializing in Chinese Studies) at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. She was selected as an American Council on Education Fellow in August 2007- May 2008, and served under the mentorship of executive-level university leadership at North Carolina State University. Dr. Brown is a former United Nations Fellow; American Institute in Taiwan intern; East-West Center Visiting Fellow in Honolulu, Hawaii; Vehicular Technology Society Connected & Autonomous Vehicles Summer School of Worcester Polytechnic Institute professional attendee; and Summer Internet Law Program participant at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. She received a National Science Foundation “Japanese Language Study Award” in 1992-1996 and a second NSF grant in 2000-2001 to support research expansion in science and engineering.
Dr. Brown served as a scholar-escort for the National Committee on U.S.—China Relations Delegation of University Presidents of Historically Black Colleges and Universities to China for the Reagan Administration in 1984; participated in the Southeast Regional American Assembly on US—China Relations, along with former President Jimmy Carter and China specialists in government and academia, to prepare a China policy statement for the US Congress and the Clinton Administration in 1998; was an invited participant in the Health Privacy Sector of the 5th Cybersecurity Framework Workshop, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in 2013; received recognition for one of the top eleven research abstracts/posters, “Vascular Inflammation and Cardiovascular Risk Quantification and Monitoring in Internet of Vehicle Participant Technologies: Layered Privacy, Trust, and Security in Precision Care,” at the 2016 Unraveling Inflammation: From Immunology to Imaging Symposium of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) of the National Institutes of Health in 2016; and was selected to join the ethics in computer science working group at the inaugural Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Computer Science Education Conference in Chengdu, Sichuan, China in 2019.
Her academic writings include topics on China’s party organization, triangular transnationalism of electronic communities, cyberspace governance, women’s rights in China, China’s second-generation identification card and RFID technology, smart card technology and e-government security, G-8 and digital divide, government responsibility to society in scientific reform, protection of genomic privacy data, health biometrics and privacy in China and the United States, robotics and ethics in deep-sea mining, content and sentiment surveillance, computing education ethics, and heart transplant primary graft dysfunction with machine learning.
Dr. Brown’s research has emphasized the intersectionality of emerging technologies, e.g., radio frequency identification (RFID), biometrics, artificial intelligence, and autonomous systems, along with health data privacy and protection, and has emphasized data privacy and privacy conceptualization in healthcare and comparative cultures. Major themes include protecting and preserving health data privacy in diverse regulatory systems, examining the role of ethics-by-design in building privacy and trust for technology acceptance in populations, and building data protection in alignment with evolving technology. She has presented her research at conferences and meetings of various organizations and institutions such as the American Political Science Association, American Public Health Association, American Society for Public Administration, Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (AIME), Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), Association of American Geographers, Exploring Cyber Society (the University of Northumbria at Newcastle), Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) World Congress, International Political Science Association, National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education (NAFEO) Presidential Peer Seminar, National Institutes of Health, Oxford Internet Institute, and Privacy Law Scholars Conference.
Her current research focuses on dynamic ethical frameworks in digital twin technology in healthcare, socio-economic determinants and machine learning affecting fairness and research integrity, cultural humility in explainable AI (XAI) for healthcare, local to global governance of responsible AI and generative AI, and digital transformation amid geopolitical conflict and cultural fractures. She served as the contact leader and a Principal Investigator of a multidisciplinary team of PI researchers in biomedical informatics, biology, computer science, engineering, medicine, psychology, and political science as recipients of an AIM-AHEAD grant of the National Institutes of Health researching “Addressing Health Inconsistencies in Heart Transplant through Fair AI/ML Approaches” in 2023 -2024 and 2024-2025. She is currently a co-PI of an NIH mixture of experts in digital twin technology multidisciplinary research team.
Dr. Brown is a member of the American Medical Informatics Association, American Political Science Association, American Public Health Association, Association for Asian Studies, Association for Computing Machinery, Digital Twin for Health Society, Health Information Management Systems Society (HIMSS), and IEEE.
Courses Taught
- POLS 3030 – Digital Twin Technology and AI Policy
- POLS 3030 – Artificial Intelligence Governance and Cooperation in Digital Transformation
- POLS 3030- Politics and Ethics of Algorithms
- POLS 3030 – Responsible AI and Generative AI in a Global Setting
- POLS 3030 – Internet of Things Technology, Law & Policy
- POLS 3148 – Politics of China
- POLS 3154 – Cyberspace and Politics
- POLS 3165 – East Asia in World Affairs
Research Interests
- Global to Local AI Policy: Governance and Cooperation
- Fair AI/ML Approaches to Address Health Inconsistencies in Heart Transplants
- Artificial Intelligence of Things and Ethical Challenges
- Digital Twin Technology Policy and Ethics in Healthcare
- Research Integrity in Scientific Information
- Indonesia’s Digital Transformation: Healthcare, Privacy Protection, and Digital Twin Technology
- China’s Expansion of Science and Technology: Innovation and Outreach