Research & Policy History

I am currently a Distinguished Technologist at the Internet Society (ISOC), where my work lies at the intersection of computer science, law, and policy. I lead programs focused on online trust and safety, advocating for technical and policy decisions that put people's safety, security, and privacy first. My portfolio includes defending end-to-end encryption, promoting open standards, and translating complex technologies to ensure they are legible and usable for everyone.

Prior to joining the Internet Society in 2019, I served as the Chief Technologist and Director of the Internet Architecture Project at the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT). In that role, my research and advocacy focused on embedding human rights values into technical standards, navigating the deep intersections of law and technology, and working to protect independent security researchers. During my time at CDT, my portfolio expanded from a primary focus on election systems to tackle broader, security-focused technology policy challenges across the Internet. A key piece of this transition was my 2014 Health Affairs paper co-authored with Deven McGraw, which argued that for telehealth to succeed, its privacy and security risks must be explicitly identified and mitigated ("For Telehealth To Succeed, Privacy And Security Risks Must Be Identified And Addressed").

Before my work in civil society, my academic research centered on the security and privacy of health information technology and electronic voting. As a Postdoctoral Research Fellow working with Helen Nissenbaum at New York University and under the HHS SHARPS grant, I explored issues like the privacy and security risks of telehealth and the role of electronic health records. From 2008 to 2011, I was jointly affiliated with the UC Berkeley School of Information and Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy. During this time, I collaborated closely with statistical pioneers like Philip Stark to lay the practical and theoretical groundwork for risk-limiting audits (RLAs)—the methods now adopted by multiple states to mathematically verify election outcomes. A major milestone of this effort was our report on the first-ever live RLA pilots conducted during the 2008 elections ("Implementing Risk-Limiting Post-Election Audits in California").

In 2008, I earned my PhD from UC Berkeley, where my dissertation examined public policy mechanisms for making computerized voting systems more transparent. I continued work in that vein as a founding member of the NSF ACCURATE center. Using electronic voting as a critical case study in digital government transparency, I served as an expert on independent teams invited by the states of California, Ohio, and Maryland to analyze the legal, privacy, security, usability, and economic aspects of voting systems (the California Top-to-Bottom Review of Voting Systems (2007), the Ohio EVEREST Review (2007), and the Maryland Voting Systems Study (2010)).

My early academic background is actually in astrophysics. After earning a Master's degree in Astrophysics from the UC Berkeley Department of Astronomy, I transitioned into information systems, applying my scientific training to issues in high technology policy, law, and computer science. This shift from hard science to organizational policy was marked by my 2003 paper in Space Policy, which analyzed the organizational failures at NASA leading up to the Columbia and Challenger space shuttle disasters ("Columbia and Challenger: Organizational Failure at NASA").

Before that, my research interests were largely centered in planetary science, specifically investigating the atmospheric characteristics of Saturn's largest moon, Titan, with my undergraduate mentor, Caitlin Griffith. We studied Titan's massive atmosphere and helped establish that Titan likely has an atmospheric cycle similar to Earth's hydrologic cycle, but with methane forming seas, lakes, clouds, and rain. This culminated in my very first publication—a 2000 paper in Science where we reported the detection of daily methane clouds on Titan ("Detection of Daily Clouds on Titan").

My advisers and mentors over the years have included Caitlin Griffith, Peter Lyman, Deirdre Mulligan, Pam Samuelson, Ed Felten, and Helen Nissenbaum.