Michael Akinwumi, PhD

As NFHA’s Chief AI Officer (CAIO), Dr. Michael Akinwumi is responsible for leading the organization’s efforts to ensure technologies impacting the housing sector are fair, privacy-preserving, reliable, transparent, and controllable. Dr. Akinwumi provides leadership in AI governance, risk management, and innovation to ensure ethical and effective AI usage that aligns with NFHA’s mission. He leads the strategic and operational aspects of AI implementation and governance at NFHA, as well as NFHA’s work to ensure private and public sectors adopt responsible AI principles. He also works on ensuring that AI technologies and initiatives in housing are both innovative and compliant with relevant civil and human rights laws, policies, and regulations, and he collaborates with private sector and public sector AI officers, including at state and federal agencies, to develop and oversee AI strategies that advance fair housing and fair lending goals, promote innovation, eliminate bias, serve humanity, and mitigate risks.

Simultaneously, as an Eagleton Civic Science Fellow, Dr. Akinwumi is dedicated to shaping AI governance frameworks for policymakers. Drawing on his background in advanced mathematics and statistical machine learning, he is working on crafting an LLM-centric guidance document for state legislators—aiming to educate and align AI regulation with best practices.

Before joining NFHA, some of Dr. Akinwumi’s work covered governance engineering, recommender systems, and machine learning solutions for various sectors, such as fintech, banking, and insurance. He holds a PhD in Applied Mathematics from the University of Alberta.

Dr. Akinwumi lives his belief that “only a life lived for others is worth living.”