Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
About the team
PCIO has convened an advisory group of leading experts from industry, media, academia, and civil society to complement Carnegie’s global network of researchers. Advisory group members participate in their individual capacities and provide strategic advice in the development of new projects and publications.
PCIO has also established institutional partnerships to promote international, cross-sectoral consensus on key issues. Our partner organizations have designated liaisons to support our work and are invited to participate in relevant projects on a case-by-case basis.
Virgilio Almeida is a professor emeritus of computer science at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG). He is also faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University. Virgilio received his PhD degree in Computer Science at Vanderbilt University, a Master’s degree in computer science at PUC-Rio, and a bachelor degree in Electrical Engineering from UFMG. He held visiting positions in several universities and research labs, such as Harvard University (School of Engineering and Applied Sciences), New York University, Boston University, Santa Fe Institute, and HP Research Labs. He was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Poly at the New York University.
Virgilio was the National Secretary for Information Technology Policies of the Brazilian government from 2011 to 2015. He was the chair of the Brazilian Internet Steering Committee (CGI.br) from 2011-2016. He was also the chair of NETmundial, the Global Multi-stakeholder Conference on the Future of Internet Governance, that was held in Sao Paulo in 2014. Virgilio was one of the commissioners of the Global Commission for the Stability of Cyberspace (cyberstability.org/). Virgilio is member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences (ABC) and the World Academy of Sciences (TWAS). He studies political tribalism, extremism, and social psychology using data from social media and tools from the emerging field of computational social science.
His research interests focus on social computing, social media, algorithms, and digital governance. He is co-author of six books, five of them dealing with Web technologies, e-commerce, performance modeling, and capacity planning, published by Prentice-Hall, US. Two of his books were also published in Russian, Korean, and Portuguese. His most recent book is: “Governance for the Digital World – Neither More State nor More Market” (Palgrave, 2020).
Chris Beall is the policy lead, platform governance, at the Centre for International Governance Innovation where he leads the Global Platform Governance Network (GPGN). The GPGN bring together civil servants, regulators, and legislative staff from around the world working on aspects of digital platform governance (e.g., anti-trust, countering foreign interference, mitigating online harms). The goal is to harmonize efforts and meaningfully move the bar forward on key issues including: digital platform transparency, performance measurement, and research.
Beall was most recently the founding director of the Digital Citizen Initiative with the Government of Canada. Previously, Beall held positions within the Government of Canada in national security, border management, and strategic finance and oversight. Beall holds a doctorate from the University of Oxford and is a college fellow at the Arthur Kroeger College of Public Affairs at Carleton University.
Graham Brookie is the director and managing editor of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) based in Washington DC.
Prior to joining the DFRLab, Brookie served in various positions at the White House and National Security Council. His most recent role was as an adviser for strategic communications with a focus on digital strategy, audience engagement, and coordinating a cohesive record of former U.S. President Barack Obama’s national security and foreign policy. Previously he served as the adviser to the assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism (APHSCT), the president’s top aide for cybersecurity, counterterrorism, intelligence, and homeland security issues. He also worked in the East Asia, Middle East, and North Africa directorates at the National Security Council.
Brookie graduated cum laude with degrees from American University in Washington, DC. He also completed the London School of Economics’ general course.
Michael Chertoff is chairman and founder of the Chertoff Group, a security and risk management advisory firm with offices in Washington, DC. Chertoff is also senior of counsel at Covington & Burling LLP’s Washington, DC, office and a member of the White Collar Defense and Investigations practice group.
Previously Chertoff served as secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. As secretary, he led a 218,000 person department with a budget of $50 billion to develop and implement border security and immigration policy, promulgate homeland security regulation, and spearhead a national cyber security strategy. He also served on the National Security and Homeland Security Councils, and on the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States.
Prior to his appointment to President George W. Bush’s cabinet, he served from 2003 to 2005 on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. Before becoming a federal judge, Chertoff was the assistant attorney general for the criminal division of the U.S. Department of Justice. In that position, he oversaw the investigation of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and formed the Enron Task Force.
Chertoff’s career includes more than a decade as a federal prosecutor, including service as U.S. attorney for the district of New Jersey, first assistant U.S. attorney for the district of New Jersey, and assistant U.S. attorney for the southern district of New York. As a federal prosecutor, Chertoff investigated and personally prosecuted significant cases of political corruption, organized crime, and corporate fraud.
Chertoff currently serves on the board of directors of Noblis, Delta Risk, and Edgewood Networks. He serves on the Advisory Boards of Sonavation, Securonix, Reporty, V Armour, and Lumina. He is also chairman of the board of directors of BAE Systems, Inc., the U.S.-based subsidiary of BAE Systems plc. Chertoff was first appointed to the Inc. board in March 2010 and appointed chairman in May 2012. He is also a member of a number of nonprofit advisory boards, including Freedom House, American Action Forum, the Global Commission on the Stability of Cyberspace, and Global Security & Privacy by Design.
Chertoff is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School. From 1979-1980, he served as a clerk to Supreme Court Justice William Brennan, Jr. Chertoff has received numerous awards including the Department of Justice Henry E. Petersen Memorial Award (2006); the Department of Justice John Marshall Award for Trial of Litigation (1987); NAACP Benjamin L. Hooks Award for Distinguished Service (2007); European Institute Transatlantic Leadership Award (2008); and two honorary doctorates. His trial experiences have been featured in over half a dozen books and many news articles.
Yasmin Green is the director of research and development for Jigsaw, a unit within Alphabet building technology to make the world safer from global security challenges.
In her role, Green leads an interdisciplinary team to forecast threats and validate technology interventions. She has pioneered new approaches to counter violent extremism and state-sponsored disinformation, including seeding the world’s first online network of former violent extremists and survivors of terrorism, launching a new advertising-based program to confront online radicalization called the Redirect Method, and informing cross-platform responses to coordinated disinformation campaigns.
Green actively advises and leads security initiatives outside Jigsaw. She is a senior advisor on innovation to Oxford Analytica and the Harvard Belfer Center’s Defending Digital Democracy Project, a member of the Aspen Cyber Strategy Group, an Anti-Defamation League board member, and co-chaired the European Commission’s Working Group on Online Radicalization from 2014-2015. Additionally, Green has been named one of Fortune’s “40 Under 40” most influential young leaders and one of Fast Company’s “Most Creative People in Business,” and she serves on the board of the Tory Burch Foundation.
Green has a first-class honours B.Sc. in economics from University College London and an M.Sc. in management from the London School of Economics and the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business.
Louise Marie Hurel is currently pursuing her PhD in Data, Networks, and Society at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) working on technical security expertise, cybersecurity governance, and incident response. Hurel leads research and cyber policy engagement at Igarapé Institute’s Cybersecurity and Digital Liberties Program. She holds an MSc in media and communications (data and society) from the LSE (distinction) and a BA in international relations from PUC-Rio. She is also a nonresident research fellow at the Brazilian Naval War College (NAC-EGN) working on the geopolitics of technology.
Hurel’s work focuses on exploring interdisciplinary approaches to contemporary security challenges and the role of non-state actors in cybersecurity (Taylor and Francis Cyber Policy Journal), regional and national Internet governance (Universidad San Andrés, UPenn), and infrastructure security, having been awarded for her dissertation “Cybersecurity and Internet Governance: Two Competing Fields.” Recent publications include book chapters on “Securitization and Cybersecurity Governance in Brazil” (Letramento), “Putting the Technical Community Back into Cyber (Policy)” (forthcoming), and “Cyber-Norms Entrepreneurship? Understanding Microsoft’s advocacy on cybersecurity” (forthcoming).
Her previous experience includes consultancy for a UNESCO project on “What if we all governed the Internet,” and research in Internet governance, privacy, and security at the Center for Technology and Society at Getúlio Vargas Foundation (CTS-FGV). Hurel has also been actively involved in Internet governance spaces, also serving as representative for Europe in the executive committee of the noncommercial users’ constituency at ICANN.
Adam Joinson is professor of information systems at the University of Bath. He has worked closely with a range of large organizations on security, technology, and behavior, as well as contributing to guidance from CPNI, NCSC, and ENISA. He is the University of Bath lead for a new Centre for Doctoral Training in Trust, Identity, Privacy, and Security (with the University of Bristol), and leads the ‘online behavior’ strand in the Centre for Research and Evidence on Security Threats, the United Kingdom’s national hub for applying behavioral and social science to national security. He has published over 100 articles, chapters, and books on technology, behavior, cybersecurity, and privacy.
Dhiraj Murthy is a professor in the School of Journalism and Media and the department of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin, where he also directs the Computational Media Lab. Amongst other things, his research explores influence operations, misinformation, and disinformation on social media, particularly from diverse, international perspectives. Murthy uses both qualitative and large-scale computational analysis and has developed unique mixed methods. He has been regularly funded by the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health in the United States. Murthy has edited three journal special issues and authored over 70 articles, book chapters, and papers. Murthy wrote the first scholarly book about Twitter (second edition published by Polity Press, 2018). He serves on the advisory board of MediaWell, an anti-misinformation/disinformation initiative by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC).
Dr. Eni Mustafaraj is an assistant professor of computer science at Wellesley College. She holds a PhD in computer science from the Philips University of Marburg and a MEng from the Polytechnic University of Tirana. Mustafaraj is a native of Albania, a country that suffered extreme isolation under a totalitarian regime from 1944-1991. Life in Albania made her experience first-hand the effects of state-run, pervasive propaganda, and ideological brainwashing. This is why since 2008 she has been studying web-based platforms (e.g. Google, Twitter, Wikipedia) to observe their susceptibility to adversarial efforts for spreading disinformation. Her co-authored paper, “From Obscurity to Prominence in Minutes: Political Speech and Real-time Search,” published in the 2nd Web Science Conference in 2010, is the first academic paper that documents the use of orchestrated Twitter bots to attack a political candidate during an election. Recently, supported by an NSF CAREER grant, she is studying credibility signals for online sources.
Jonathan Corpus Ong is associate professor of global digital media in the University of Massachusetts - Amherst. He is the author of two books and over 25 journal articles in the areas of media ethics, humanitarian communication, and digital politics. He is currently co-principal investigator on a National Science Foundation Accelerator Grant (2021-2022) entitled “FACT Champ,” which investigates racially targeted misinformation and hate against Asian American and Pacific Islander communities in the wake of Covid-19. In his disinformation studies research, Jonathan uses ethnography to understand the social identities, work arrangements, and moral justifications of workers behind shadowy influence operations.
Jonathan is also research fellow of Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center. He leads the collaborative initiative on the “True Costs of Disinformation” for the Technology and Social Change (TaSC) Project. This initiative aims to develop new conceptual tools and practical models that can measure the financial, social, and human costs of disinformation.
Andrew Przybylski is the director of research at the Oxford Internet Institute. His work is mainly concerned with applying psychological models of motivation and health to study how people interact with virtual environments including video games and social media. He is particularly interested in integrating open, robust, and reproducible science with evidence-based policymaking in the digital age. His undergraduate (2004), postgraduate (2009), and doctoral (2011) degrees were attained at the University of Rochester.
A journalist in Asia for nearly 35 years, Maria Ressa co-founded Rappler, the top digital only news site that is leading the fight for press freedom in the Philippines. As Rappler’s executive editor and CEO, Ressa has endured constant political harassment and arrests by the Duterte government, forced to post bail eight times to stay free. Rappler’s battle for truth and democracy is the subject of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival documentary, A Thousand Cuts.
For her courage and work on disinformation and ‘fake news,’ Ressa was named Time Magazine’s 2018 Person of the Year, was among its 100 Most Influential People of 2019, and has also been named one of Time’s Most Influential Women of the Century. She was also part of BBC’s 100 most inspiring and influential women of 2019 and Prospect magazine’s world’s top 50 thinkers. Among many awards, she received the prestigious Golden Pen of Freedom Award from the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers, the Knight International Journalism Award from the International Center for Journalists, the Gwen Ifill Press Freedom Award from the Committee to Protect Journalists, the Shorenstein Journalism Award from Stanford University, the Columbia Journalism Award, the Free Media Pioneer Award from the International Press Institute, and the Sergei Magnitsky Award for Investigative Journalism.
Before founding Rappler, Ressa focused on investigating terrorism in Southeast Asia. She opened and ran CNN’s Manila Bureau for nearly a decade before opening the network’s Jakarta Bureau, which she ran from 1995 to 2005. She wrote Seeds of Terror: An Eyewitness Account of al-Qaeda’s Newest Center of Operations in Southeast Asia and From Bin Laden to Facebook: 10 Days of Abduction, 10 Years of Terrorism.
Chris Riley is a senior fellow of Internet Governance at R Street, where he leads the Knight Foundation-funded project on content moderation, running convenings of a broad range of stakeholders to develop a framework for platforms managing user-generated content. Riley also conducts policy analysis around content regulatory issues related to that project, including work on Section 230 in the United States and the Digital Services Act in the European Union.
Prior to joining R Street, Riley led global public policy work for the Mozilla Corporation, managing their work on the ground in Washington, D.C., Brussels, Delhi, and Nairobi from Mozilla’s San Francisco office, and worked with government policymakers, stakeholders in industry and civil society, and internal teams at Mozilla to advance their mission. Prior to that, he worked in the U.S. Department of State to help manage the Internet Freedom grants portfolio designated by Congress to support technology development, digital safety training, research, and related work as a part of advancing the expression of human rights online in internet-repressive countries.
Riley received his bachelor’s in computer science from Wheeling Jesuit University, his PhD in computer science from Johns Hopkins University and his JD from Yale Law School.
Dr. Erin Saltman is the director of programming at the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT). She was formerly Facebook’s head of counterterrorism and dangerous organizations policy for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa; working with multi-sector stakeholders and building out CVE programs for Facebook in partnership with international NGOs. Dr. Saltman’s background and expertise includes both far-right and Islamist extremist processes of radicalization within a range of regional and socio-political contexts. Her research and publications have focused on the evolving nature of online extremism and terrorism, gender dynamics within violent extremist organizations, and youth radicalization. Previous roles include senior research and programs positions at Quilliam Foundation and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD Global), where she remains a research fellow.
Dr. Saltman is a graduate of Columbia University (BA) and University College London (MA and PhD).
Jacob N. Shapiro is professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University and directs the Empirical Studies of Conflict Project, a multi-university consortium that compiles and analyzes micro-level data on politically motivated violence in countries around the world. His research covers conflict, economic development, and security policy. He is author of The Terrorist’s Dilemma: Managing Violent Covert Organizations and co-author of Small Wars, Big Data: The Information Revolution in Modern Conflict. His research has been published in a broad range of academic and policy journals as well as a number of edited volumes. He has conducted field research and large-scale policy evaluations in Afghanistan, Colombia, India, and Pakistan.
Shapiro received the 2016 Karl Deutsch Award from the International Studies Association, given to a scholar younger than 40, or within 10 years of earning a Ph.D., who has made the most significant contribution to the study of international relations. He is an associate editor of Journal of Conflict Resolution, World Politics, and Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, a faculty fellow of the Association for Analytic Learning about Islam and Muslim Societies (AALIMS), a research fellow at the Center for Economic Research in Pakistan (CERP), and an associate fellow of the Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives (IDEAS). Shapiro was previously president and chief scientist of Giant Oak, a venture-funded company whose software provides domain-specific search and screening tools to government agencies and financial services firms. He earned a Ph.D. in Political Science and an M.A. in Economics at Stanford University and a B.A. in Political Science at the University of Michigan. Shapiro is a veteran of the United States Navy.
Rhona Tarrant is a journalist and editor focused on mis/disinformation and open source investigations. Tarrant currently serves as U.S. editor for Storyful, an international social media news agency, where she leads a team working on visual verification and investigations for the world’s largest publishers, including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, ABC, and more.
Tarrant has trained journalists around the world to verify, debunk, and track online mis/disinformation through her work with the Google News Initiative and the Facebook Journalism Project. Her team at Storyful also works with independent fact checking organizations to verify and debunk information on Facebook.
Tarrant was a 2020 and 2021 Assembly:Disinformation Fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center, where she worked with a cohort of technologists, policymakers, and professionals to explore problems related to disinformation from a cybersecurity perspective. While at Harvard, Tarrant co-founded Disinfodex, a database that allows researchers to better analyze public disclosures about disinformation campaigns issued by major social media platforms.
Tarrant previously worked as a reporter for RTE Radio 1, Ireland’s national broadcaster, and with WNYC in New York. She holds a bachelor’s degree in New Media and English from the University of Limerick and a masters degree in Journalism and Media Communications from Griffith College Dublin.
Clint Watts is a distinguished research fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, nonresident fellow at the Alliance for Securing Democracy, and senior fellow at the Center for Cyber and Homeland Security at George Washington University. He is also a national security contributor for NBC News and MSNBC. He recently examined the rise of social media influence by publishing his first book entitled Messing With The Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians and Fake News.
His research and writing focuses on terrorism, counterterrorism, social media influence, and Russian disinformation. Watts’s tracking of terrorist foreign fighters allowed him to predict the rise of the Islamic State over al Qaeda in 2014. From 2014 to 2016, Watts worked with a team to track and model the rise of Russian influence operations via social media leading up to the U.S. presidential election of 2016. This research led Watts to testify before four different Senate committees in 2017 and 2018 regarding Russia’s information warfare campaign against the U.S. and the West.
Watts’s writing has appeared in a range of publications including the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, the Daily Beast, Politico, Lawfare, War On The Rocks, and the Huffington Post.
Before becoming a consultant, Watts served as a U.S. Army infantry officer, a FBI special agent, as the executive officer of the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point (CTC), as a consultant to the FBI’s Counter Terrorism Division (CTD) and National Security Branch (NSB), and as an analyst supporting the U.S. Intelligence Community and U.S. Special Operations Command.
Benjamin Wittes is a senior fellow in Governance Studies at The Brookings Institution. He co-founded and is the editor-in-chief of Lawfare, which is devoted to sober and serious discussion of "Hard National Security Choices." He is a contributing writer at the Atlantic. Wittes is the author with Susan Hennessey of Unmaking the Presidency: Donald Trump's War on the World's Most Powerful Office. His previous books include The Future of Violence: Robots and Germs, Hackers and Drones-Confronting A New Age of Threat (2015), coauthored with Gabriella Blum. They also include Detention and Denial: The Case for Candor After Guantanamo (2011); Law and the Long War: The Future of Justice in the Age of Terror (2008); Confirmation Wars: Preserving Independent Courts in Angry Times (2006); Starr: A Reassessment (2002). He has edited three books: Campaign 2012: Twelve Independent Ideas for Improving American Public Policy (2012), Constitution 3.0: Freedom and Technological Change (2011), and Legislating the War on Terror: An Agenda for Reform (2009). Between 1997 and 2006, Wittes served as an editorial writer for the Washington Post specializing in legal affairs. Before joining the editorial page staff of the Post, Wittes covered the Justice Department and federal regulatory agencies as a reporter and news editor at Legal Times. His writing has also appeared in a wide range of journals and magazines including Slate, The New Republic, The Wilson Quarterly, The Weekly Standard, Policy Review, and First Things. Wittes was born in Boston, Massachusetts. He graduated from Oberlin College in 1990, and he has black belts in both taekwondo and aikido.
Samuel Woolley is an assistant professor in the School of Journalism and the School of Information (by courtesy) at the University of Texas (UT) at Austin. He is the program director of the propaganda research lab at UT’s Center for Media Engagement and research director of disinformation analysis for the UT “Good Systems” grand challenge—a university wide project exploring ethical AI design. He is a research affiliate at the Project on Democracy and the Internet at Stanford University, the former director of research of the Computational Propaganda Project at the University of Oxford, and the founding director of the Digital Intelligence Lab at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, CA.
Dr. Woolley began working on questions related to computational propaganda--how automation and algorithms are used over social media in attempts to manipulate public opinion--in 2013. His broader research is focused on how emerging media technologies, from extended reality (XR) tools to AI voice emulation systems, are leveraged for both freedom and control. His latest book, The Reality Game: How the Next Wave of Technology Will Break the Truth (2020, PublicAffairs), explores this subject. He is the co-editor, with Dr. Philip N. Howard, of the book Computational Propaganda: Political Parties, Politicians, and Political Manipulation on Social Media (2018, Oxford University Press). He has two forthcoming books, Manufacturing Consensus: Understanding Propaganda in the Digital Age (2021, Yale University Press) and Bots (2021, Polity). His writings on tech, propaganda, and policy have been published by the National Endowment for Democracy, the Brookings Institution, the Stanford Hoover Institution, Open Society Foundations, USAID, and the German Marshall Fund. He has written for the Atlantic, Wired, Foreign Affairs, MIT Technology Review, the Guardian, Motherboard-Vice, Slate, and TechCrunch. His research on web-based manipulation campaigns has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Financial Times and presented to members of the U.S. Congress, UK Parliament, EU Parliament and NATO.
He is a former fellow at Google Jigsaw, the German Marshall Fund of the United States, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the University of Washington Tech Policy Lab, and the Center for Media, Data and Society at Central European University. He has past academic affiliations with CITRIS at UC Berkeley and the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford. His PhD is from the University of Washington in Seattle.
Eric Chen-hua Yu is an associate research fellow of the Election Study Center and jointly appointed as an associate professor of political science at National Chengchi University in Taipei, Taiwan. He has been a research fellow and program manager of Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) (2006-09). In addition to his academic post, he has also been director of domestic affairs of Taiwan Foundation for Democracy (TFD) (2016-19). His research interests include electoral politics, public opinion, and public policy analysis. Yu received a MS in Public Policy Analysis from the University of Rochester and a Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University.
Ginny Badanes leads Democracy Forward, an initiative within Microsoft’s Technology & Corporate Responsibility organization that is focused on addressing ongoing challenges to the stability of democracies globally. The program includes efforts to protect elections, political parties, campaigns, and NGOs from actions that undermine democracy. This work includes Microsoft’s journalism program, which is focused on combating disinformation, expanding news distribution, increasing media literacy, and working with community-based programs and newsrooms to use technology to expand their reach.
Badanes has spent her career at the intersection of politics and technology. Before joining Microsoft in 2014, she was vce-president of Political at CMDI, where she advised presidential and senate campaigns on their efforts to leverage data and technology to improve their finance and treasury operations.
Badanes was recently named to Washingtonian’s 2021 “Most Influential People” list for national security and defense. She is a graduate of Duke University and currently lives in Arlington, VA with her husband, Dave, and their three boys.
Kelly Born is the director of the Cyber Initiative at the Hewlett Foundation, a ten-year, $130 million grant-making effort that aims to build a more robust cybersecurity field and improve policy-making.
Prior to directing Hewlett’s Cyber Initiative, Born served as the founding director of Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center, a leading academic center focused on improving the governance of digital technologies and their impact on security, geopolitics, and democracy. Before joining Stanford, Born helped to launch and lead the Democracy Program at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, one of the largest philanthropic undertakings in America working to improve U.S. democracy. There, Born designed and implemented strategies focused on money in politics, electoral reform, civic engagement, and digital disinformation. In this latter capacity, Born worked with academics, government leaders, social media companies, foundations, and nonprofits around the world to help improve online information ecosystems.
Earlier in her career, Born worked as a strategy consultant with the Monitor Group, supporting strategic planning efforts at Fortune 100 companies, governments, and nonprofits in the United States, Africa, Asia, Latin America ,and Europe. She holds a master’s degree in international policy from Stanford University.
Nathaniel Gleicher is the head of security policy at Facebook. He leads the company-wide efforts to identify and counter emerging and persistent threats across its platforms, like influence operations and cybersecurity risks. He is an engineer and lawyer and has worked in security for more than fifteen years. He has taught computer programming, built and secured computer networks, prosecuted cyber crime at the U.S. Department of Justice, served as director for cybersecurity policy at the National Security Council (NSC) in the White House, and as head of cybersecurity strategy at Illumio. At the NSC, he developed U.S. government policy on key technology and cybersecurity challenges, including encryption, cyber deterrence, internet governance, and network security.
Kelly McFarland is a U.S. diplomatic historian and director of programs and research at Georgetown University’s Institute for the Study of Diplomacy (ISD). At ISD, he oversees the Institute’s research agenda, which included a series of practitioner/scholar working groups on information operations. He also teaches courses on diplomatic history, foreign affairs, and other topics in Georgetown's Walsh School of Foreign Service. His writing has appeared in the Washington Post, the Conversation, and Responsible Statecraft, among others.
From 2009 to 2016, Kelly served in the U.S. Department of State, with the bulk of his time spent as an intelligence analyst in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. From 2014 through 2015, he worked for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, where he briefed the Presidential Daily Briefing Book to Secretary of State John Kerry and other senior State Department officials.
Philip Mai, M.A., J.D., is the co-director of the Social Media Lab at the Ted Rogers School of Management at Ryerson University and cofounder of the International Conference on Social Media and Society. In his work, he focuses on tech policy issues, knowledge mobilization, information diffusion, business and research partnerships, and practical application of social media analytics. As a proponent of computational social science, Mai has been cited frequently by other scholars, and his commentary has appeared in various national media outlets, including CBC’s the National, the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, and Global National.
Craig Newmark is a Web pioneer, philanthropist, and leading advocate. Most commonly known for founding the online classified ads service craigslist, Newmark works to support and connect people and drive broad civic engagement.
In 2016, he founded Craig Newmark Philanthropies to advance people and grassroots organizations that are “getting stuff done” in areas that include trustworthy journalism and the information ecosystem, voter protection, women in technology, and veterans and military families. At its core, all of Newmark’s philanthropic work helps to strengthen American democracy by supporting the values that the country aspires to—fairness, opportunity, and respect.
Newmark serves on the board of directors of a number of organizations, including Blue Star Families, the Center for Public Integrity, Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York, Girls Who Code, Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of American, Poynter Foundation, Sunlight Foundation, VetsinTech, and Women in Public Service Project. He also serves on the Board of Overseers of the Columbia Journalism Review and on the advisory board of nearly twenty other nonprofit organizations, including DonorsChoose.org, EFF, New America Foundation, Voto Latino, Wikimedia Foundation, and Women Who Tech.
In 1995, Newmark started curating a list of San Francisco arts and technology events, which he personally emailed to friends and colleagues. People were soon calling it “Craig’s List,” and when Newmark turned it into a company, he monetized it minimally, opting for a business model that prioritized “doing well by doing good.” Today, more than 5 billion ads have been posted on the site, the vast majority for free. Newmark has not been involved in the day-to-day management of the company since 2000.
Born in Morristown, New Jersey, Newmark earned degrees in computer science from Case Western Reserve University. He lives in San Francisco and New York City and enjoys birdwatching, science fiction, and Dad jokes. Newmark travels the country speaking about the initiatives he supports, and he uses Twitter to further get the word out—and share photos of birds.
Nick Pickles is the director of global public policy strategy at Twitter. Previously, he was head of public policy for Twitter in the UK and before that the director of civil liberties and privacy campaign group Big Brother Watch. A law graduate from the University of Durham, he served as president of Durham Students’ Union and stood as a candidate in the 2010 UK General Election. He is also a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, an internationally published music photographer, and a trustee of the international development charity BBC Media Action.
Joanna Rohozinska is the resident program director for Europe with the International Republican Institute. Based in Brussels she oversees IRI’s Beacon Project, which focuses on building resilient democracies. Rohozinska has been engaged in programs in the post-Communist space for 20 years, living and working in several countries in the region, and joined IRI after more than a decade with the National Endowment for Democracy’s Europe programme. She holds a graduate degree in Russian and European history from the University of Toronto where she focused on nationalism and foreign policy issues within the Russian and Soviet Empires.
Since 2017, Ben Supple has served as a public policy manager at WhatsApp responsible for elections, politics and government, and the civic use of WhatsApp products. He is in charge of designing engagement strategies with countries and building relationships with policymakers, academics, and civil society to tackle election-related abuse and to promote the positive use of WhatsApp products. He was previously associate vice president of The Cohen Group, a strategic advisory firm led by former U.S. Secretary of Defense William Cohen. He is a graduate of the Harvard Kennedy School and Columbia University.
Thiago Tavares has bachelor and master degrees in Law and Business, and teaches computing law, human rights theory, and technology & society in post-graduate courses at the Catholic University of Bahia. He is the founder and president of SaferNet, the 14-years long Safer Internet Center for Brazil. SaferNet is the first-ever NGO in Brazil to established a multistakeholder approach to protect human rights in the digital environment.
Tavares has served on several task forces, boards, and advisory councils on Internet safety such as Brazilian Senate (2008/2010), INHOPE Board (2014/2016), and the Brazilian Superior Court for Elections advisory council on Internet and disinformation (2017/2018). Currently he serves on the safety advisory boards of Facebook, Twitter, and Google, and represents civil society at the Brazilian Internet Steering Committee (2014/2020), where he is the chairperson of the Security and Rights Chamber.
Over the last 15 years his work on child safety, digital security, and Internet governance issues has been presented in more than 30 countries, including nine UN IGF editions. In 2013 he received, on SaferNet’s behalf, the National Prize of Human Rights, granted by the presidency of the Federative Republic of Brazil.
Dr. Jake Wallis is an analyst in ASPI’s International Cyber Policy Centre where he assesses the information warfare capabilities of state and non-state actors.
Wallis has worked in national security and as an academic researching the impact of digital connectivity on political participation.
Wallis’s PhD explored the mobilization of online networks by political groups. His subsequent research investigated the polarization of online political debate and the use of social media by extremist groups. Wallis has been an invited contributor to NATO’s Innovation Hub and has provided analysis of extremist groups’ messaging tactics for both the ABC and SBS.
Clement Wolf leads Google’s global public policy work on issues pertaining to information integrity. In that capacity, he advises and works with product, engineering, and trust/safety teams at Google and YouTube on relevant product launches and cross-company initiatives. Previously, Wolf was a public policy advisor to the Google News team and led Google’s global public policy work on the future of work and other economic issues.
Wolf earned a bachelor’s degree in law from Universite Paris I; a master’s degree in international affairs (with emphasis on security) from Sciences Po Paris; and a master’s degree in management from ESSEC Business School.