Dr. Amanda Benjamin is a Digital Justice Fellow at the Thurgood Marshall Institute, where her work examines how modern technological innovations, such as artificial intelligence and surveillance systems, are shaping the landscape of civil rights, democracy, and justice. She investigates how these systems can reproduce racial bias and anti-Black harm, particularly within policing and public safety contexts, and how they might instead be leveraged to advance equity, accountability, and collective justice.
Dr. Benjamin earned her PhD, MPhil, and MA in Psychology and Law from the City University of New York Graduate Center (John Jay College of Criminal Justice). Her dissertation (‘Alerted and Anxious?: The Effects of Mobile Crime Alerts on Perceptions of Personal and Public Safety’) was funded by the New York State Office of Mental Health. She also holds a BA in Psychology from Elon University.
Before joining LDF, Dr. Benjamin worked as an adjunct professor of psychology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and held research fellowships with the Vera Institute of Justice and the Center for Policing Equity. She also worked as a Project Coordinator at the Developmental Social Neuroscience Lab at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
