Dr. Jin Ai Joins Rutgers SPAA Faculty as Assistant Professor

Dr. Jin Ai has joined the School of Public Affairs and Administration (SPAA) at Rutgers University–Newark as an assistant professor starting in Fall 2025.

Dr. Ai’s research interests include science, technology, and innovation (STI) policy, computational social science, artificial intelligence and algorithmic governance, and philanthropy and nonprofit studies. She integrates systematic engineering and computational methods to study social issues, focusing on how emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, along with public and philanthropic funding and civic participation, drive innovation in science, technology, and society. Her current work employs large datasets, network analysis, and natural language processing to uncover hidden patterns in government and civil society innovation systems, with the goal of informing smarter and more responsible STI policy and funding strategies.

Her teaching reflects this research agenda by advancing data and AI literacy for government and nonprofit management. She has designed courses on AI and emerging technologies to help bridge the gap between technological innovation and public/nonprofit leadership and practice. For Fall 2025, she launched a new MPA course at Rutgers SPAA titled AI for Government and Nonprofits.

Before joining SPAA, Dr. Ai was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. She earned her PhD in Philanthropic Studies from Indiana University’s Lilly Family School of Philanthropy and a Master of Public Administration from Renmin University of China.