Tawanna Dillahunt (she/her)

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Visiting Scholar, Urban Studies and Planning and IDSS

Tawanna Dillahunt is a 2023-2024 MIT MLK Fellow in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning and IDSS, and an associate professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Information. She holds a courtesy appointment with the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department. She leads the Social Innovations Group (SIG), an interdisciplinary group of individuals whose vision is to design, build, and enhance technologies to solve real-world problems affecting marginalized groups and individuals primarily in the U.S. Her current projects aim to address unemployment, environmental sustainability, and technical literacy by fostering social and socio-technical capital within these communities. At MIT, she is working to explore and raise the visibility of alternative economic futures for Black and Brown Detroiters.

Dillahunt, an ACM Distinguished Member and inaugural Skip Ellis Early Career Award recipient, was a 2022-2023 William Bentinck-Smith Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute.


MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02139-4307
617-253-1764