Helena Rong
Co-Area Head, IBM
Helena Rong is Co-Area Head of Interactive Media and Business (IMB) and an Assistant Professor of Interactive Media and Business at NYU Shanghai and Director of the Protopolis Lab.
Trained as an architect, urbanist, and institutional researcher, her work examines how emerging technologies, from data-driven urban systems and blockchain networks to decentralized AI agents, are reshaping trust, governance, and collective life. Her research sits at the intersection of design, urban studies, decentralized governance, and AI, with particular attention to how social coordination is increasingly organized through platforms, protocols, infrastructures, and autonomous systems.
She also serves as Research Director at Metagov, Curriculum Development Fellow at the Summer of Protocols supported by the Ethereum Foundation, and a Filecoin Foundation affiliate scholar at the University of San Francisco’s Center for Law, Tech, and Social Good.