Carlos Centeno

Carlos Centeno is a director at MIT’s DesignX, where he helps entrepreneurs transform bold ideas at the intersection of technology and creativity into solutions for positive change through design-driven innovation.

Centeno is a 2026 Ethics & Tech Practitioner Fellow at the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society. He co-founded SOMOS Civic Lab. At the lab, the team is designing tools to democratize generative AI in Global Majority countries. As MIT Emerging Talent program director, he equipped learners from migrant and refugee communities with computer science skills. He co-founded and directed MIT's Governance Innovation Initiative, as associate director of innovation; co-designed and launched MIT's first Governance Innovation Research Fellowship, and hosted MIT's Power to the Who governance innovation podcast.

He was previously at the UN for 10 years, where he worked in community and government preparedness to natural disasters based in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. His AI (NLP) prototype ALIA was a Google launchpad finalist in Munich (2018). He has supported investigative journalism projects at Pro Publica on disappearances and detentions by the U.S. federal government, for which the team was nominated for the 2026 Shahid Award for Ethical Journalism; was a winner of the National Magazine Awards (U.S. 2026); a winner of the Al Neuharth Award for Investigative Journalism (2026), and the National Journalism Award (Venezuela, 2026), among other awards and nominations.