2023-2024 Tech Policy Fellows

Announcing the inaugural cohort

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.

Meet the Tech Policy Fellows below and read their full bios on the CITRIS Policy Lab tech policy fellows webpage.

Alexandra Belias 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.

Emma Leiken 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.

Jared Lewis is a public policy entrepreneur, specializing in digital access and sustainable economies. He currently serves as Head of Policy for Dentsu Good, an international environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) accelerator, where he is helping to shape digital first, circular economy projects in partnership with some of the world’s largest corporations.

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.

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 engineer 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.

Nadah Feteih 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 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 defense and military cyber forces, as well as emerging and disruptive technologies. Before joining the center, 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.

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 is the former Head of Trust & Safety at Twitter. For more than seven 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. 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.