About Us

Brandi Geurkink is a Senior Policy Fellow at Mozilla, the global nonprofit behind Firefox. At Mozilla, Brandi comes up with new ways to hold the internet’s biggest platforms accountable for algorithms, online advertising, privacy, and other issues. Brandi is the creator of YouTube Regrets, the largest-ever crowdsourced investigation into YouTube’s recommendation engine and its impact on society. YouTube Regrets has been featured in hundreds of news stories, cited in the EU’s Digital Services Act, and won a coveted Shorty Impact Award. In addition to her role at Mozilla, Brandi is also a Strategic Consultant for Reset Tech, part of Luminate Strategic Initiatives, and a Research Fellow with Siegel Family Endowment.

David Lazer is a University Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Computer Sciences, Northeastern University, and Co-Director of the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks. Prior to coming to Northeastern University, he was on the faculty at the Harvard Kennedy School (1998-2009). In 2019, he was elected a fellow to the National Academy of Public Administration. His research has been published in such journals as Science, Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, the American Political Science Review, Organization Science, and the Administrative Science Quarterly, and has received extensive coverage in the media, including the New York Times, NPR, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and CBS Evening News.

He is among the leading scholars in the world on misinformation and computational social science and has served in multiple leadership and editorial positions, including as a board member for the International Network of Social Network Analysts (INSNA), reviewing editor for Science, associate editor of Social Networks and Network Science, numerous other editorial boards and program committees.

James Mickens is a Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University. His research focuses on the performance, security, and robustness of large-scale distributed systems. Prior to becoming a professor at Harvard, Dr. Mickens spent seven years at Microsoft Research; he was also a visiting professor at MIT. At Harvard, he serves on the Board of Directors for the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society; he is also a Faculty Director for the Institute for Rebooting Social Media.

Nabiha Syed is the CEO of The Markup, a media startup that investigates how powerful actors use technology to reshape society. In 2022, The Markup was recognized by FastCompany as both a World Changing Idea and one of the Most Innovative companies. Forbes has called Nabiha “one of the best emerging free speech lawyers.”

Previously, Nabiha served as Vice President and Associate General Counsel at BuzzFeed, as the company’s first newsroom lawyer, and as the First Amendment Fellow at The New York Times. She has worked on legal access issues at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, represented asylum-seekers in south Texas, counseled on whether to publish leaked and hacked materials, co-founded the nation’s first media law clinic, and spoken widely about misinformation and propaganda. For her work, Nabiha has been named as a “Rising Star” by the New York Law Journal, a finalist for the Outstanding Young Lawyer of the Year from the International Bar Association, and received an inaugural Reporter’s Committee for the Freedom of the Press Award. She holds a law degree from Yale Law School and from Balliol College, Oxford, which she attended as a Marshall Scholar.