Lena Hafner is a postdoctoral researcher at TransforM – the Munich Centre for Transformative Technologies and Societal Change. She conducted her PhD in Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge and holds an M.A. in International Political Economy from King’s College London and a B.A. in International Cultural Studies from the University of Passau.

Her research focuses on fairness, minority protection, and the societal implications of emerging technologies. On the one hand, these themes underpin her doctoral research on immigrant entrepreneurship from a world-systems perspective. On the other hand, they motivated her to develop de-biased AI tools for the study of ethnic inequalities, including name-to-ethnicity classification and sentiment analysis systems.

Her work has been published in leading journals such as AI & Society and The Journal of Computational Social Science. After gaining work experience in consulting firms, such as McKinsey and BCG, she co-founded N2E (https://www.name-to-ethnicity.com/) – a platform providing fair, customizable name-to-ethnicity classification AI to other social scientists interested in uncovering the world’s inequalities. Researchers and practitioners interested in the tool are warmly encouraged to contact her. 

Hafner, F.S., Hafner, L., and R. Corizzo (2025), ‘Slightly Disappointing vs.Worst Sh** Ever: Tackling Cultural Differences in Negative Sentiment Expressions in AI-based Sentiment Analysis’, Journal of Computational Social Science, 8(3), pp.1-31, doi: 10.1007/s42001-025-00382-y.

Palme, C., Hafner, L., et al. (2024), ‘Artificial Intelligence (AI) Reveals Ethnic Disparities in Cataract Detection and Treatment’, Ophthalmology and Therapy, 13(6), pp.1683-92, doi: 10.1007/s40123-024-00945-8. 

Hafner, L., Peifer, T., and Hafner F. (2023), 'Equal Accuracy for Andrew and Abubaker – Detecting and Mitigating Bias in Name-Ethnicity Classification Algorithms’, AI & Society, 39(4), pp.1605-29, doi: 10.1007/s00146-022-01619-4.

Hafner, L. (2022), 'Springboard, Not Roadblock: Discourse Analysis of Facebook Groups Suggests that Ethnic Neighbourhoods in European Cities might Jump-Start Immigrants’ Integration', European Urban and Regional Studies, 29(3), pp. 383-407, doi: 10.1177/09697764211057490.