A native of the UK, Nigel Cameron has spent much of his professional life in the United States.

Former President and CEO of the Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies in Washington, DC, he is a Senior Fellow of the University of Ottawa’s Institute for Science, Society and Policy, where he was recently Fulbright Visiting Research Chair in Science and Society. He was earlier Research Professor and Associate Dean at the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he led projects on the social impact of developments in biotechnology and nanotechnology, and the policy implications of diabetes.

Cameron has been a featured speaker at a range of international events, including the Aspen Ideas Festival and Global Health Forum, Planet under Pressure (UNESCO/Royal Society prepcon for Rio+20) (London), the Champalimaud Foundation conference on the world in 100 years (Lisbon), TEDx Port Alegre (Brazil), the World Healthcare and Innovation Technology Summit (Washington, DC), the STARS emerging leaders conference (Switzerland), the Economist Asia Investors Summit (Hong Kong) and conference on the digital economy (Madrid), and most recently a UN Human Rights Council expert consultation on AI and human rights.

He has also chaired many international conferences at the interface of technology, business, and policy, including the GITEX and Future Tech events in Dubai, conference series on the Internet of Things in Brussels and Washington, DC, and the European Identity and Cloud conference in Munich.

He has testified to committees of both U.S. Houses of Congress, on issues including nanotechnology and the security implications of emerging technologies, and to the European Parliament and the European Commission’s science and technology Group on Ethics. He has also served on U.S. Government diplomatic delegations to the UN General Assembly and UNESCO. He served four terms as a Commissioner of the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO, including as chair of its Social and Human Sciences Committee. In the early 2000s he served as a member of Project Horizon, a U.S. Government inter-department strategic planning exercise led by the Department of State; and was also the U.S. Government’s nominee (unsuccessful) to the U.N. Human Rights Council for Special Rapporteur for the Right to Health.

He has written and edited a number of books on the impact of emerging technologies, including Nanoscale: Issues and Perspectives (Wiley) and Will Robots Take Your Job? A Plea for Consensus (Polity/Wiley), which has just appeared in Chinese. He also served as first tech editor of the UK journalistic website UnHerd. He has appeared on network media in several countries, including on ABC Nightline and PBS Frontline in the US, and BBC Newsnight and Breakfast with Frost in the UK.

On the corporate side, he is currently a non-executive director of Genesis Systems LLC, a U.S.-based start-up developing innovative technologies for air-generated water. He has been a columnist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on corporate social responsibility and tech, and served as adviser to corporations including Constellation Research and Giesecke & Devrient. Three times he has been executive-in-residence at Wolfsberg, the UBS executive development center in Switzerland. He is also on the committee of HumanIN, a start-up advisory on the human dimensions of AI. 

He is a graduate of Cambridge and Edinburgh universities, and the Edinburgh Business School.