Bio
Shaunette T. Ferguson is a network scientist trained as an economist whose research examines the structure and dynamics of complex social and technological systems. Originally from Jamaica, she has worked in public-sector economic policy and conducted doctoral research in Japan as a MEXT Scholar at Kobe University, experiences that inform her comparative and systems-oriented perspective.
She is currently a Postdoctoral Associate at the Institute for Data, Research, and Innovation Science (IDRIS), Rutgers University–Newark, where she studies the geographic expansion of AI infrastructure and its socioeconomic consequences. Her research examines how the benefits and burdens of data center expansion are distributed across countries and communities, and how governance models might enable affected communities to participate in decision-making and share more equitably in AI’s economic gains.
Her work spans digital platforms, financial networks, and disaster-response systems, with a focus on how coordination, breakdown, and recovery emerge from timing, feedback, and interaction structure. She is also the author of When Systems Speak, a project exploring how complexity becomes visible when systems begin to strain or fail.
As part of her 2026–2027 ICDE Fellowship, she will develop an AI-assisted Coordination Readiness Kit to support NeedsMap in contexts where digital infrastructure is unreliable, translating disaster-response cases from Jamaica and the Caribbean into practical offline diagnostics, relay-node guides, and solidarity provisioning tools.