Nancy Fulda

Biography

Nancy Fulda the director of BYU's DRAGN Lab, a research group that studies machine learning, knowledge representation, and societal impacts of generative AI. She was a 1995 Howard W. Hunter scholar, a 2011 Jim Baen Memorial Award winner, and a team lead in Amazon's inaugural Alexa Prize Competition. In 2024 she was named one of Utah's top 100 AI professionals.

Recent publications from Dr. Fulda's research group include Out of One, Many: Using Language Models to Simulate Human Samples and A Tale of Two Cultures: Comparing Interpersonal Disclosure Norms on Twitter. Ongoing research in her lab is studying ways to make AI systems more human-centered and energy-efficient. Her work is funded by the National Science Foundation, the Simmons Research Foundation, Sandia National Laboratories, and industry donors.

In recent years, Dr. Fulda has become a leading voice at the intersection of artificial intelligence and faith, studying how religious perspectives can contribute to the design, governance, and responsible deployment of advanced AI. As a founding member of the Consortium for Evaluating Faith and Ethics in AI (CEFE-AI), she works with academic partners including Baylor University, Notre Dame University, Yeshiva University, and Pepperdine University to ensure that questions of meaning, human flourishing, moral responsibility, and spiritual values retain a place alongside technical considerations in conversations about AI safety and alignment. Her work has been featured on KSL, Fox News, and USA Today.

In addition to her academic work, Dr. Fulda also writes science fiction. She has been nominated for the both the Hugo and Nebula Awards and has written on request for David Brin, TOR Books, and MIT’s Technology Review, as well as for the Dark Expanse space strategy game. She is the delighted mother of six children.

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