In the Spotlight – Meet Sara Colombo

In the Spotlight: Meet Sara Colombo

At Women in AI we’d like to inspire others by featuring women role models that are making a difference in AI. We aim to empower women who are working in AI by highlighting their success stories. This way we hope to inspire other women and girls to get into STEM-related fields. In our series ‘In the Spotlight’ we shine a light on an expert in the field and today we’d like you to meet Sara Colombo.

Author: Sharadhi Alape Suryanarayana

About Sara

Sara is an Assistant Professor of Designing Responsible and Empowering AI and the Director of the Feminist Generative AI Lab at Delft University of Technology, Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering (feministailab.org). She is a passionate researcher who investigates new approaches, methodologies, and tools to design fair and ethical AI systems, empower individuals through AI, and shape AI futures through public engagement. Her research aims to merge feminist AI and design futuring approaches to explore new ways to co-create more inclusive and just AI systems.

Before joining TU Delft, she was an Assistant Professor at TU Eindhoven, a Research Scientist at Northeastern University in Boston, and previously a Senior Research Associate, Project Lead, and Lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She obtained her PhD at Politecnico di Milano, Italy.

Sara has led numerous research projects across the US and Europe, with a focus on AI for health and wellbeing. As the co-founder of the Feminist Generative AI Lab, she coordinates multidisciplinary research efforts aimed at cultivating inclusive and equitable AI practices, employing a feminist perspective.

Research, teaching, entrepreneurship, and public engagement: An all-rounded commitment to human-centric AI

Human-centric AI, as interesting as it sounds, is a domain that comes with multiple layers of challenges. While human values need to be coded into AI systems and their design processes, agreeing on what values should be prioritized is a complex challenge. At the same time, the functioning of sophisticated AI systems needs to be communicated to non-experts, in order to empower all those affected by AI to co-create these solutions. In her work, Sara tackles each of these challenges while focusing on shaping responsible, ethical, and feminist AI, contributing to both academic and industrial AI ecosystems.

Leading in this direction, Sara has co-founded and directs the Feminist Generative AI Lab at TU Delft (a research initiative co-hosted with Erasmus University Rotterdam), securing more than €1 million in funding to investigate how to develop inclusive and fair AI systems that reflect feminist principles. As an Assistant Professor in Designing Responsible and Empowering AI at TU Delft, Sara plays a key role in shaping the next generation of responsible AI researchers and professionals. She teaches future designers how to create AI systems grounded in ethics and human values while also supervising PhD and master students working on feminist, participatory, and human-centered AI.

On the research valorization front, Sara has co-founded the startup Hummin’, an innovative system set out to “make the invisible visible”. Here, the invisible refers to the mental wellbeing of healthcare workers and teachers, a quintessential yet often overlooked building block of the society whose burnout and stress can have lasting effects. Using the data collected by the system, Hummin’ aims to use AI to predict workers’ risk of burnout. The project ‘Caring for Caregivers’ with the aforementioned goal has secured a research grant by ClickNL in 2022. Sara is also part of a ZonMw-funded project focused on developing responsible AI for cardiac screening. Additionally, her role as a Program Talent at the TU Delft AI Labs & Talent Programme shows her commitment to innovative research. She is also developing a toolkit for self-assessing digital and AI systems’ ethical compliance, empowering organizations to ensure their AI solutions align with human values.

Sara also plays an active role in disseminating her research contributions both in academic publications and conferences, as well as in public events and exhibits. She has published extensively in international academic conferences and journals. She also speaks regularly at public and industry events in the Netherlands, such as “Women in AI: Empowering the future” at Cognizant, or the Feminist Cafe’ in Delft, catering to a broader audience. She actively contributes with talks and exhibits to national events such as the Dutch Design Week (2021, 2022, 2024), and the AI & Design Symposium, educating the public on human-centered and ethical AI. To foster dialogue on just and inclusive AI, she has co-organized the Feminist AI Symposium in Delft in 2024.

Through research, teaching, entrepreneurship and public engagement, Sara aims to make AI inclusive and fair, contributing to the Netherlands’ leadership in ethical AI.

AI for Impact: A template on how to practice what you preach, one project at a time

Through her research on responsible and ethical AI, Sara aims to make a significant impact on both academia and society.

At TU Delft and as a visiting professor at institutions like Politecnico di Milano, she teaches the next generation of designers how to create AI systems grounded in human values and feminist principles. Her approach combines theoretical knowledge with hands-on, practice-based design projects. For example, her students’ projects and installations on the use and impact of AI in current and future systems were exhibited at Dutch Design Week. Her previous work has been showcased at international venues, including the Design Museum in London (2021), Den Bosch (2022), Sejong Center in Seoul (2023), Ars Electronica (2020), Lille World Design Capital (2020), and Rome Maker Faire (2017).

To enable the development of responsible AI systems, she generates knowledge and tools for researchers and professionals to design human-centered, ethical AI. Next to sharing her work through academic publications and talks at international conferences, she disseminates her research outcomes through open-source projects like the Mix&Match ML toolkit.

With a focus on serving society through research during a challenging time, in 2020, she founded and led Design for Emergency, a global project that collected and analyzed data using AI to understand people’s challenges during the Covid-19 lockdown. This project inspired new design solutions and expanded to 12 countries, being presented at various international venues. As a co-founder of Hummin’, a US-based startup that was described earlier, Sara feels she has the opportunity to apply the principles of ethical AI to develop real-world solutions, driving the integration of responsible AI practices into industry and contributing to a more ethical, human-centered approach to AI.

Being Part of the WAI Awards

Curious to learn more about Sara, her work and the amazing work our other Women in AI Award nominees have done? Join us on February 7th at the Women in AI Gala, where the official Award winners will be presented. Come and celebrate all these remarkable women forging the path on making a significant impact in AI across the Benelux region. We can’t wait to see you there!