Dr Kerry McInerney is a Corpuscle several times over. She first came to Corpus as an undergraduate Girdler's Scholar (from New Zealand) studying Social & Political Sciences. She followed that with a MPhil and then a PhD in Gender Studies (as a Gates Scholar). During that time her research focus was on gender-based injustice, particularly acts of radical political self-sacrifice committed by women. Having grown up in a number of international contexts, including in Sierra Leone during the closing stages of the civil war, she was keen to challenge the heteronormative discourses around female political acts.

Since then, Kerry's work has pivoted towards a broad range of emerging technologies and their use cases and impacts. She has continued to concentrate on the implications for women of new technologies and she also focusses on the Asian Diaspora, including anti-Asian racism in AI. She says, "I look at the technologies themselves and how they might not work for certain groups of people, or how they perpetuate biases and racial or sexist archetypes. There are a lot of these ideas and stereotypes in contemporary tech development and imaginaries around AI. I also look at the geopolitics of AI, such as the concept that there is a US/China 'arms race' for AI, which that has really negative effects for Asian diasporic peoples living in the West and also perpetuates a lot of racial stereotypes."

Beyond the technologies and the narratives that have emerged around them, there are further considerations to interrogate about AI, such as the tremendous environmental impact of the amounts of water and energy, and the monopolisation of the market by a very small number of major players. She says, "There's a lot of distraction taking place in the discourse about AI. Many people are focussed on the dangers of AI 'taking over the world'. That's an interesting question, but it's probably getting a little bit too much airtime in comparison to other things, like the environmental consequences."

On the academic front, Kerry wears several hats. She is currently a Research Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence and a Research Associate at St John's College, Cambridge. She is a AHRC/BBC Radio 3 New Generation Thinker, a Research Fellow at AI Now, and a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies, UCL. She is also an affiliate of the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation, Cambridge Digital Humanities, the Gender and Feminism Research Network at UCL, and the Centre for Digital Humanities at UCL. Her output is impressive. Recently published papers include Tech workers' perspectives on ethical issues in AI development; Who makes AI? Gender and portrayals of AI scientists in popular film 1920-2020; and Does AI debiase recruitment? Race, Gender, and AI's 'Eradication of Difference'.

Kerry is the co-host (alongside Dr Eleanor Drage) of The Good Robot Podcast, which features leading speakers and thinkers across the world on feminism and technology. (Helpfully, transcripts of the episodes are available on the podcast website.) The duo has recently edited The Good Robot Book, a collection of essays by leading feminist scholars, technologists and activists.

She has also appeared on popular podcasts such as The Guilty Feminist and the Radical AI Podcast, has been recognised as one of the 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics 2022, and has been shortlisted for the Champion of Women - Champion of Innovation (2022), Women of the Future - Technology and Digital (2022), and Women in Tech Excellence - Rising Star (2022) awards.

With the rapid development of AI, social media, digital algorithms, surveillance, and much more, Kerry is unlikely to run out of ethical questions to explore. You can find her on Twitter/X as @KerryAMcInerney and on her own website to keep up (if you can!) with her very prolific publishing, public speaking and academic projects.