Lindsey DeWitt Prat moved from windswept Wyoming to Paris by way of Japan—years on sacred mountains and classical texts, then a jump from Buddhist studies professor to global research leader in emerging technology. With a background in global politics, premodern Asian religions, visual culture, ritual technologies, and placemaking, her practice is fundamentally multidimensional.

After a PhD in Asian Languages and Cultures at UCLA, Lindsey taught at Kyushu University in Japan and Ghent University in Belgium, where her research examined the social and historical formation of sacred sites, cultural heritage, and gender exclusion. Fieldwork took her to mountains and sumo rings closed to women, tracing who may enter and who may not from premodern prohibitions through modern heritage law to arguments underway now.

Since 2022, Lindsey has designed and led global research programs on emerging technology at Bold Insight, turning methods honed on the past toward the future. The subject is still languages and cultures, now at a wider aperture: how systems built in one place behave in another, which complexities survive the crossing, and what bringing the world into view requires of the teams who build them.

In 2025, EPIC People, a global community of more than 13,000 research practitioners bridging academia and industry, appointed Lindsey to its governing board. Alongside that work, she holds research affiliations at the University of Western Australia and Utrecht University’s Inclusive AI Lab, a Distinguished Fellowship at Vietnam’s Da Nang Policy Lab, and a program faculty seat with the Innovation Policy Ignition Programme at Hughes Hall, University of Cambridge.

Lindsey’s published scholarship includes chapters and articles with Routledge, Bloomsbury Academic, and Oxford University Press, and the co-edited volume Water Powers: Sacred Aquatic Animals of the Asia-Pacific (University of Hawai‘i Press). A co-authored ethnographic study of large language models in African contexts, published in the EPIC Proceedings, won the UXalliance Most Impactful Project Award and was featured at the AI for Developing Countries Forum at the United Nations in Geneva. In parallel she translates from Japanese to English for corporate and cultural clients, among them Mori Building and the Government of Japan. Trained in classical Japanese and classical Chinese, she reads old texts and new systems with the same philological care.

Lindsey DeWitt Prat moved from windswept Wyoming to Paris by way of Japan—years on sacred mountains and classical texts, then a jump from Buddhist studies professor to global research leader in emerging technology. With a background in global politics, premodern Asian religions, visual culture, ritual technologies, and placemaking, Lindsey’s practice is fundamentally multidimensional. She is currently a Director of Research at Bold Insight, an EPIC People Board Member, an Adjunct Senior Research Fellow in Linguistics at the University of Western Australia, and a 2026–27 Fellow of Utrecht University’s Inclusive AI Lab.

Lindsey DeWitt Prat moved from windswept Wyoming to Paris by way of Japan—years on sacred mountains and classical texts, then a jump from Buddhist studies professor to global research leader in emerging technology. She is a Director of Research at Bold Insight, an EPIC People Board Member, and an Adjunct Senior Research Fellow in Linguistics at the University of Western Australia.