Michael Akinwumi, PhD

Michael Akinwumi leads the National Fair Housing Alliance’s Tech Equity Initiative (TEI). The TEI is a multi-faceted effort launched by NFHA to make algorithmic systems in the housing and financial services industries responsible in their design and implementation.

Conducting research to advance the AI fairness field is a cornerstone of National Fair Housing Alliance’s TEI. Dr. Akinwumi leads research and testing efforts on algorithmic fairness, privacy enhancing technologies, computer vision algorithms, generative AI and algorithmic auditing as they apply to housing and financial services.

He is responsible for acquiring and managing data, and developing technical solutions for the initiative while managing cross-functional relationships to ensure that solutions that result from the initiative meet NFHA and stakeholders' expectations.

Previously, Dr. Akinwumi led governance engineering efforts at a FinTech by minimizing exposures to regulatory risks, managed a machine learning-powered recommender system that presents product and service offers to retail customers of a bank, and pioneered the use of machine learning solutions in auto and property insurance pricing of a P&C insurance company.

Dr. Akinwumi received a Ph.D. degree in Applied Mathematics from the University of Alberta, Canada, two MSc. under the prestigious European Union’s Erasmus Mundus scholarship from the Johannes Kepler University, Austria and RPTU Kaiserslautern-Landau, Germany. and a BSc. from the Federal University of Agriculture, Abeokuta, Nigeria.