Berkman Klein Center Announces Incoming 2023-2024 Fellows

The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University is thrilled to announce an extraordinary cohort of incoming fellows for the 2023-2024 academic year.

The group’s expertise and interests range from intellectual property law and algorithmic infrastructure, to privacy and AI fairness frameworks, to journalism and digital communication issues. These incoming fellows join BKC’s vibrant research community of faculty associates, affiliates, and visiting scholars with corporate, academic, and civil society experience drawn from around the globe.

"BKC’s fellowship program, spanning all disciplines and contributors both within and without academia, is vital to the Center's independent spirit," said BKC co-founder Jonathan Zittrain. “Our fellows help to ask the biggest, toughest questions about technology every day -- and respond with new methods, theories, and serendipitous insights, thanks to immersive, sustained participation in an engaged community.”

The fellows strengthen and grow the vast BKC network by adding unique perspectives to regular dialogues and debates while building ambitious projects and forging deep, collaborative bonds.

"As we welcome this fresh class of fellows to Berkman Klein, we renew our commitment to fostering relevance and impact in the field," said Lis Sylvan, BKC Interim Executive Director. "Their lively presence drives new inquiry across disciplines, and invigorates the Center with compelling expertise from transnational, cross-sector, and nontraditional backgrounds.”

“The Berkman Klein Fellowship is not just a program; it's a movement to shape the field with greater connection and deeper compassion,” affirmed Rebecca Tabasky, BKC Director of Community. “Our fellows seek to catalyze their research in service of advancing the autonomy and human rights of all peoples, and we are privileged to bring together this group committed to developing scholarship with impact. Each incoming fellow has used their work to expand and diversify the conversations of which they are a part, and we are excited to see how they will interlace and further grow their efforts through their fellowships.”

The BKC fellowship program aims to foster an environment that emphasizes being engaged, open, and kind, and to create a culture of collaboration. 

Joining the community as 2023-2024 Berkman Klein fellows on September 1, 2023:

Lauren Bridges  researches the social and environmental impacts of digital infrastructures. She publishes work on surveillance infrastructures, digital labor, and digital failure, among other topics. As a fellow, she will explore the global policy challenges to addressing the e-waste crisis, while working on a book manuscript on the limits of global digital growth and its associated local impacts. From Fall 2024, Bridges will be Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia.

Huili Chen  is a multidisciplinary researcher, scientist, and designer with a passion for creative practices who holds a Ph.D. from MIT Media Lab. Her research is at the intersection of social robotics, human-centered AI, and interactive communication. Pursuing intellectual synergies, she takes cross-disciplinary approaches to seek answers to fundamental questions on human experience and extending the boundaries of human capacity.

Diana Freed  will be a joint fellow at BKC and at the Center for Research on Computation and Society at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Diana researches the intersection of technology and society, focusing on security and privacy, human-computer interaction, digital literacy, behavioral health, and technology policy to improve online safety and well-being for vulnerable and marginalized populations. She received her PhD in Information Science from Cornell University and is a 2024 incoming Assistant Professor at Brown University in the Department of Computer Science and the Data Science Institute.

Mehtab Khan’s scholarship intersects intellectual property, in particular copyright and trademark law, internet law, privacy, anti-discrimination, and law and ethics of data-driven technologies. She is interested in how technology impacts society, and analyzing the role of law in mitigating and shaping that impact. Her recent academic scholarship includes articles on developing an accountability framework for large-scale AI datasets, regulating Generative AI speech tools, and the impact of AI on the creative industries. She will continue to work on these issues as a fellow. She will also look at mechanisms for governing data that is used to develop and deploy AI technologies, with particular interest in how to ensure diversity and representation in the development process and the ways in which the harms and impacts overlook marginalized groups.

Rebekah Larsen has a PhD in sociology from the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on understudied media environments, particularly at the intersection of rurality, religion, and radio. While a fellow, she will be focused on exploring the Utah media environment using ethnographic and digital methods. She will also be working on her first monograph based on her doctoral work examining how different media actors framed the Right to be Forgotten.

Dasha Pruss will be a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center and a postdoctoral fellow in the Embedded EthiCS program at Harvard University. She draws on methods from the social sciences, philosophy, and law to study the impacts of algorithmic decision-making systems and other ‘evidence-based’ reforms in the US criminal legal system. She also co-organized efforts to ban facial recognition and predictive policing in the city of Pittsburgh. During her time at the Berkman Klein Center, she will build on her doctoral work to develop and implement human-centered, participatory audits of recidivism risk assessment instruments. She received her PhD in History & Philosophy of Science from the University of Pittsburgh and holds a BS in Computer Science from the University of Utah.

Angela Xiao Wu is an Associate Professor in Media, Culture and Communication at NYU. Focusing on the infrastructures and politics of knowledge production, her scholarship has engaged with critical data studies, audience analytics, computational methods, and post/socialism studies. As a fellow, she will work on a book, Mass Speech Administration: From the Socialist Press to Platform Atmospherics, which examines how public culture takes shape when systems thinking informs its conception and governance. Wu works at the intersection of media and communication, science and technology studies, and China studies, and her research combines humanities and social science methods, from oral and archival histories to quantitative analyses of web traffic and social media traces. Her past work includes the examination of Chinese media and politics beyond the oppression-resistance binary, and the analysis of macro-patterns of media use in relation to technological environments.

Maitreya Shah is a blind lawyer and researcher. His work lies in the interstices of the ethics and governance of emerging technologies and disability rights and at BKC he will examine AI fairness frameworks from the standpoint of disability justice and inclusion. He graduated with dual degrees in Arts and Law (B.A., LL.B, Hons.) from Gujarat National Law University, India, and an LLM from the University of Pennsylvania Law School. He has extensively worked in the areas of digital accessibility, AI governance, regulatory technologies, and disability law. His research and scholarship integrates perspectives from AI ethics and critical disability studies to foreground the experiences of people with disabilities.

Madhavi Sunder is the Frank Sherry Professor of Intellectual Property Law at the Georgetown University Law Center and is a scholar of intellectual property law, law and technology, women’s human rights, and international development. She will use her fellowship year to write a book on cultural appropriation and intellectual property. Her scholarship is interdisciplinary, straddling private and public law, and engages the global dimensions of law, from patents and access to medicines, including Covid 19 vaccines, to trademarks and university brands. Her research interests include racial capitalism, moral cultural economy, biopiracy, traditional knowledge, and law and popular culture.

Johanna Wild, a German open-source researcher and founder of the investigative tech team at Bellingcat in Amsterdam, will study how open-source research tools can be collaboratively built, maintained and made accessible to the diverse global researcher community. She will join the community as a 2023-2024 Nieman-Berkman Fellow in Journalism Innovation.

Annie Jieping Zhang, founder and CEO of Matters Lab in Hong Kong and Taiwan, will work on building decentralized support networks for independent journalists who face censorship and political repression. She will join the community as a 2023-2024 Nieman-Berkman Fellow in Journalism Innovation.

About the Berkman Klein Center

The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University is dedicated to exploring, understanding, and shaping the development of the digitally-networked environment. A diverse, interdisciplinary community of scholars, practitioners, technologists, policy experts, and advocates, we seek to tackle the most important challenges of the digital age while keeping focus on tangible real-world impact in the public interest. Our faculty, fellows, staff, and affiliates conduct research, build tools and platforms, educate others, form bridges and facilitate dialogue across and among diverse communities. More information at cyber.harvard.edu.