Sonja is the Glenn and Deborah Renwick Leadership Professor in AI and Ethics and Professor of Practice at the University of Florida, where she teaches the next generation of technologists to critically examine how AI can promote human flourishing while mitigating harm. She is the Director of the Renwick Program for Safe, Ethical and Beneficial AI – the institution’s inaugural program dedicated to AI ethics, safety, and social impact, as well as the co-Director of the NLP&Culture Lab and a member of the Florida Institute for Cybersecurity. With more than 16 years across academia, government, and industry, her work integrates social and ethical considerations into how AI is developed and how it is used to address its own broader societal consequences. Her research treats cultural pluralism not as an ethical add-on but as a structural safety condition for AI. Drawing on anthropology and philosophy, she argues that preserving diversity of thought is itself a precondition for humane futures.

Before returning to academia, Sonja spent more than 14 years in the tech industry, leading multi-million-dollar DARPA programs that drew on social theory — including moral disengagement — to counter misinformation and online hate speech. Her work also spanned gender and cultural bias detection in AI and the development of small language models for underrepresented linguistic communities, such as Hausa speakers in Nigeria. Earlier, she led several NASA-funded space simulation studies at the HI-SEAS habitat on the Big Island of Hawaii, investigating how teams live and work together in prolonged isolation under extreme conditions.