Bridget Algee-Hewitt
Dr. Bridget Algee is the Senior Associate Director of the CCSRE Research Institute and a computational biologist and anthropologist whose work advances social justice and seeks to redefine human rights policy and practice for underserved communities, with a focus on Indigenous and immigrant populations. She studies how biology and culture intersect across personal and group identities, interrogating the hierarchies of identity embedded in immigration, medical, and legal systems and surfacing their ties to displacement, poverty, and violence, particularly in transborder regions and across the United States, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Latin America.
Integrating data science with community-based research, she brings interdisciplinary scholarship and anti-oppressive praxis to issues of race, identity, and inequality across the sciences, humanities, and arts. As a data scientist, she develops ML, AI, and NLP methods to model complex patterns of human biology and behavior using genetic, skeletal, linguistic, life-history, and social-context data. As a forensic biologist, she supports medico-legal investigations and helps identify missing and unknown persons—especially along La Frontera.
A passionate advocate for refugee and rights and for survivors of trauma, especially human trafficking, Dr. Algee provides expert testimony for asylum petitions and policy. With applied expertise in wellbeing, belonging, and inclusive programming in academic, business, and tech sectors, she centers the experiences and needs of the communities she serves to expose latent injustices, disrupt structural violence, and redress disparities.
Dr. Algee has held faculty, research, strategist, and distinguished fellow roles ands institutions worldwide, worked within BIG Tech in Data Science, R&D, UX Research, and Advertising & Monetization, E-commerce and Marketing, and has served on executive boards for best practices in science, technology, and justice. Her work has been funded by major agencies including NSF, SSHRC, and NIJ, and her recent volumes include The Reality of the Dead in Brazil (2023), Changing the Landscape of Identity in Forensic Anthropology (2022), and Remodeling Forensic Skeletal Age (2021).