Derek Leben

Derek Leben is Associate Teaching Professor of Ethics at the Tepper School of Business. His research focuses on principles of fairness and weighing harms, and how organizations can implement these principles into standards for AI and autonomous systems. He received his PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 2012, and taught ethics at the University of Pittsburgh for ten years before joining Tepper. He is author of the books Ethics for Robots (Routledge, 2018) and AI Fairness (MIT Press, 2025). As founder of the consulting group Ethical Algorithms, Dr. Leben has worked with governments and companies to develop policies on fairness and benefit for AI and autonomous systems.

Any discussion about the responsible use of new technologies demands both technical knowledge and ethical reasoning. Dr. Derek Leben brings years of experience in ethical debate and analysis to help organizations deal with new ethical challenges. He has advised governments and Fortune 500 companies on their policies around new technologies, with an emphasis on clearly stating an organization’s ethical assumptions, what practices the organization accepts and rejects, and what sacrifices the organization is willing to make. In both classrooms and corporate education, Dr. Leben creates a forum for respectful debate, where leaders and future leaders explain and defend their ethics policies to critics.

Derek Leben, Ph.D., is also featured faculty for Carnegie Mellon Tepper School of Business Executive Education program, Emerging Business Applications of GenAI.