Prof. Sonja Schmer-Galunder

Biography

Sonja Schmer-Galunder is the Glenn and Deborah Renwick Leadership Professor in AI Ethics and Director of the Renwick Program for Safe, Ethical and Beneficial AI at the University of Florida’s Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering. A social anthropologist by training, she works at the intersection of social science and computer science, bringing a cross-cultural lens to the alignment and ethics of intelligent systems and translating between engineers, policymakers and the communities AI affects.

She has spent more than fifteen years leading applied research programs, from humanitarian disaster relief to national security and AI for low-resource languages, where cultural misunderstanding carries real consequences. Her research on computational models of politeness and social regard examines how AI systems navigate culturally specific norms of respect, a core concern for diplomacy. She has written on AI monoculture and “thick” alignment, arguing that alignment is a social and political, not a technical, problem.

She contributed to the UN Global Dialogue on AI Governance, chaired a panel at IASEAI’26 at UNESCO in Paris, and contributes to the OECD.AI/GPAI expert working group on multicultural AI. She also co-authored a proposed Model Commitment on Digital Agency for international AI governance. At UF, she teaches two graduate classes: AI Ethics for Technology Leaders and Global AI Ethics, a course on the ethical questions raised by AI’s global reach.