Tech Policy Fellows
The CITRIS Policy Lab and the Goldman School of Public Policy are pleased to announce the inaugural class of UC Berkeley Tech Policy Fellows. These remarkable technology policy leaders were selected from among hundreds of applicants; they’ll spend the next 6-12 months conducting research, working on responsible technical/policy interventions, and engaging with the extended UC Berkeley academic community.
Interested in learning more about the UC Berkeley Tech Policy Fellowship program?
2023-2024 Tech Policy Fellows Cohort
Alexandra Belias
Alexandra leads DeepMind’s international public policy work, with a focus on the EU and US as well as global initiatives. Prior to joining DeepMind, she was Head of International Government Engagement at Aviva, where she drove policy development and advocacy campaigns on sustainable finance and trade and investment. She has an MPA in Economic Policy from the London School of Economics.
Emma Leiken
Emma is a human rights advocate and technologist with a commitment to belonging, information integrity, safety and inclusion both online and off.
Currently on the Responsible Technology team at Omidyar Network, Emma leads a portfolio focused on youth organizing and responsible technology. At ON, she also works on the private trustworthy messaging work stream. Both are premised on the idea that we deserve a world where we can experience both safety and privacy online. Previously, Emma focused on the exclusionary risks and role of human intermediaries in India’s Aadhaar biometric ID infrastructure at the London School of Economics. Before that, she researched the financial challenges faced by new internet users in India, Indonesia, Mexico and Brazil at Google. In 2016, Emma was a Fulbright-Nehru Research Fellow where she completed ethnographic research focused on human rights, gender, and religious studies in Maharashtra, India. She holds a B.A. in religion from Oberlin College and an M.A. in international development with a focus on technology from the LSE. Emma serves on the board Cyber Collective.
Jared Lewis
Jared Lewis is a Public Policy entrepreneur, focusing on technology policy. He is currently a student at the Fordham University School of Law and most recently worked as Head of Policy for dentsu Good, an international ESG accelerator. Some of his past experiences include Director at the Broadband Equity Partnership, Global Program Manager at Airbnb and the inaugural Congressman John Lewis Social Justice Fellow for Science and Technology where he worked to develop the Technology Equity Agenda for the Congressional Black Caucus TECH2025 Initiative. Jared holds a Masters of Public Policy from the University of Chicago and a Bachelors of Political Science from The George Washington University.
Kirsten Rulf
Kirsten Rulf is a Partner and Associate Director at the Boston Consulting Group. Until April 2023 she was a senior advisor to former German Chancellor Angela Merkel and current German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and the Head of Unit in the Federal Chancellery in Berlin. Kirsten led on all strategic questions of innovation and emerging technologies, like Artificial Intelligence, the data economy, Quantum Computing, and the overall strategic approach to European digital sovereignty. During her time in the government, Kirsten also directed German data and digital initiatives on EU, G7, G20 levels. Kirsten Rulf is a Yale World Fellow 2022, a Harvard Kennedy School MPP alumna 2017, an alumna of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, a McCloy Fellow, and an alumna of Oxford University. She has previously also had a decade-long career as an award-winning TV correspondent for German national TV ARD.
Luca Belli
Luca Belli was the Co-founder and Research Lead for Twitter’s Machine learning Ethics, Transparency and Accountability (META) where he guided industry leading approaches for responsible ML practices and product changes. Previously he operated as a Data Science and Machine Learning Engineers at Conversant and WolframAlpha. His research interests lie at the intersection of feedback loops, algorithmic amplification (with a special eye on politics), and algorithmic audits. He holds a Ph.D. in Math from Tor Vergata University in Rome.
Nadah Feteih
Nadah Feteih completed her Bachelors and Masters in Computer Science specializing in Systems and Security from UC San Diego. She is a previous software engineer and has worked in privacy across the tech industry, interning on the Google Wipeout team in 2018 and subsequently interning on the Anti-Scraping team at Facebook in 2019. After joining Meta full-time in 2020, she worked on both the Messenger Privacy and Instagram Privacy teams. Her work and activism in the privacy and integrity space has introduced her to tech ethics and public interest tech, and she would like to further research and explore the topic of content governance across social media.
Piret Pernik
Piret Pernik is a Researcher at the Strategy Branch of the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence (NATO CCDCOE). Her main research interests are cybersecurity strategies and policies, cyber defence and military cyber forces, as well as emerging and disruptive technologies. Before joining the centre, she worked as a Research Fellow at the International Centre for Security and Defence (ICDS) and as a Researcher at the Estonian Academy of Social Sciences. Her career includes several positions at the Estonian Ministry of Defence between 2003-2013. In 2009-2012 she served as an adviser of the National Defence Committee of the Parliament of Estonia.
Ram Shankar Siva Kumar
Ram Shankar Siva Kumar is Data Cowboy at Microsoft, working on the intersection of machine learning and security. At Microsoft, he founded the AI Red Team to systematically find failures in AI systems, and empower engineers to develop and deploy AI systems securely. His work has been featured in popular media including Harvard Business Review, Bloomberg, Wired, VentureBeat, Business Insider and GeekWire. He is an affiliate at Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University. Currently, he is working on his book “Not With A Bug But With a Sticker” focusing on attacks on AI systems and what to do about it.
Yoel Roth
Yoel is the former Head of Trust & Safety at Twitter. For more than 7 years, he led Twitter’s policy and threat investigation teams responsible for a wide range of security, authenticity, and content issues, including platform manipulation, misinformation, election security, data privacy, and user identity. Before joining Twitter, Yoel received his PhD from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. His research and teaching focused on understanding how policy, governance, and code influence the types of communities that are able to safely and securely form online — and how the choices of developers, designers, and policymakers can systematically push certain types of identities and communities to the digital margins.
Articles and Publications
