Cheryl Brown

Cheryl L. Brown, Ph.D. is Chair and Associate Professor of the Department of Political Science and Public Administration and a faculty affiliate of the School of Data Science, Social Aspects of Health Initiative, and CyberDNA Center at UNC Charlotte. Dr. Brown teaches courses on Chinese domestic and foreign policy, East Asian foreign policy, politics and ethics of algorithms, and responsible artificial intelligence and generative AI. 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; intern at the American Institute in Taiwan; East-West Center Visiting Fellow in Honolulu, Hawaii; and Summer Internet Law Program participant at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. She 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 others 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; 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, 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, and computing education ethics.

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 diverse 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), 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 socio-economic determinants and machine learning affecting fairness and research integrity, cultural humility in explainable AI (XAI) for health care, local to global governance of responsible AI and generative AI, AI-oriented infoveillance and health disparities, and digital transformation amid geopolitical conflict and cultural fractures. She is a Principal Investigator of a multidisciplinary team of 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 studying “Addressing Health Disparities in Heart Transplant through Fair AI/ML Approaches.”

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, Black in AI, Health Information Management Systems Society (HIMSS), IEEE, National Conference of Black Political Scientists, and Women in AI.

Courses Taught

• POLS 3030 – Digital Twin Technology and AI Policy
• POLS 3030 – Politics and Ethics of Algorithms
• POLS 3030 – Responsible AI and Generative AI in a Global Setting
• POLS 3030 – Big Data and Artificial Intelligence: Privacy, Ethics, & Governance
• 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

• AI Bill of Rights/Executive Order and Global to Local AI Policy
• Fair AI/ML Approaches to Addressing Health Disparities in Heart Transplants
• Algorithmic and Implicit Bias in Healthcare
• Black Women’s Continuum of Health Disparities: Enslavement to “Jim Code”
• Digital Twin Technology Policy and Ethics in Healthcare
• Social and Ethical Implications of Artificial Intelligence and Other Technologies in Health Disparities
• Data Privacy Protection and Ethics in Healthcare of Diverse Populations and Regulatory Systems
• Socio-economic Determinants of Machine Learning and Research Integrity in Scientific Information
• Indonesia’s COVID-era Digital Transformation and Multi-level Metrics
• China’s Expansion of Science and Technology: Challenge of the Aging Population