Sylvester A. Johnson is co-founder and CEO of the Corporation for Public Interest Technology. Working at the intersection of technology and humanities, he is also joining Northwestern University as a faculty member in the Department of Black Studies. He previously served as Associate Vice Provost for Public Interest Technology and Director of the Center for Humanities at Virginia Tech, where he was a faculty member in the Department of Religion and Culture. Sylvester also served as Executive Director of the Tech for Humanity initiative at Virginia Tech. In the fall 2024, Sylvester will join the Kluge Center of the Library of Congress as the Kluge Chair in Technology and Society.Sylvester's work advances human-centered research and development of new approaches to ethical governance of technology, focusing on Artificial Intelligence, inequality, human-machine combining (cybernetics), and synthetic biology. Before moving to Virginia Tech, he worked at Northwestern University in African American Studies and Religious Studies, where he led a collaborative AI project. His research examines religion, race, and empire in Atlantic geographies; religion and sexuality; and the impact of AI technologies on human identity. Johnson completed his PhD at Union Theological Seminary in 2002, where he studied race and religion with James H. Cone. He has held previous academic appointments at Florida A&M University in Tallahassee, Florida, and at Indiana University-Bloomington. Johnson has authored or edited four books: _The Myth of Ham in Nineteenth-Century American Christianity: Race, Heathens, and the People of God_ (2004), is an award-winning study of race, Christianization, and religious hatred; African American Religions, 1500-2000: Colonialism, Democracy, and Freedom_ (Cambridge University Press 2015); _The FBI and Religion: Faith and National Security Before and After 9/11 (U California 2017); and _Religion and US Empire: New Critical Histories_. Johnson is a founding Co-Editor of the _Journal of Africana Religions_, a peer-reviewed journal that publishes research on religion in Africa and throughout the Black diaspora. He is currently writing a book on the changing relationship between humans and intelligent machines.