Susan Athey is the Economics of Technology Professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business.  She received her bachelor’s degree from Duke University and her PhD from Stanford, and she holds an honorary doctorate from Duke University. She previously taught at the economics departments at MIT, Stanford and Harvard. Her current research focuses on the economics of digitization, marketplace design, and the intersection of econometrics and machine learning.  She has worked on several application areas, including timber auctions, internet search, online advertising, the news media, and virtual currency. As one of the first “tech economists,” she served as consulting chief economist for Microsoft Corporation for six years, and now serves on the boards of Expedia, Rover, and Ripple.  She also serves as a long-term advisor to the British Columbia Ministry of Forests, helping architect and implement their auction-based pricing system.

Tara Behrend studies the psychology of information privacy. At CASBS she will explore how big data can lend support to education and workforce development without compromising individuals’ fundamental right to privacy. She will develop a book that investigates how human self-determination and well-being are affected by the increased prevalence of big data, surveillance, and monitoring.

Behrend is an industrial and organizational psychologist with expertise in how technology affects the world of work. Her work has been published in the fields of information technology, psychology, and education. Her work has also been funded by the National Science Foundation. She is a psychometrician for the American Council on Education and a senior research fellow for the Massachusetts Institute for College and Career Readiness. She has advised a broad range of organizations in the US and internationally.

Behrend is associate professor of industrial-organizational psychology at the George Washington University. She earned a BS from the University of Pittsburgh and a PhD from North Carolina State University. In 2016–17, Behrend is a Stanford Cyber Initiative fellow at CASBS.

Nathaniel Persily is the James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, with appointments in the departments of Political Science, Communication, and FSI.  Prior to joining Stanford, Professor Persily taught at Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and as a visiting professor at Harvard, NYU, Princeton, the University of Amsterdam, and the University of Melbourne. Professor Persily’s scholarship and legal practice focus on American election law or what is sometimes called the “law of democracy,” which addresses issues such as voting rights, political parties, campaign finance, redistricting, and election administration. He has served as a special master or court-appointed expert to craft congressional or legislative districting plans for Georgia, Maryland, Connecticut, New York, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania.  He also served as the Senior Research Director for the Presidential Commission on Election Administration. In addition to dozens of articles (many of which have been cited by the Supreme Court) on the legal regulation of political parties, issues surrounding the census and redistricting process, voting rights, and campaign finance reform, Professor Persily is coauthor of the leading election law casebook, The Law of Democracy (Foundation Press, 5th ed., 2016), with Samuel Issacharoff, Pamela Karlan, and Richard Pildes. His current work, for which he has been honored as a Guggenheim Fellow, Andrew Carnegie Fellow, and a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, examines the impact of changing technology on political communication, campaigns, and election administration.  He is codirector of the Stanford Program on Democracy and the Internet, and Social Science One, a project to make available to the world’s research community privacy-protected Facebook data to study the impact of social media on democracy.  He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a commissioner on the Kofi Annan Commission on Elections and Democracy in the Digital Age.  Along with Professor Charles Stewart III, he recently founded HealthyElections.Org (the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project) which aims to support local election officials in taking the necessary steps during the COVID-19 pandemic to provide safe voting options for the 2020 election. He received a B.A. and M.A. in political science from Yale (1992); a J.D. from Stanford (1998) where he was President of the Stanford Law Review, and a Ph.D. in political science from U.C. Berkeley in 2002.   

Michelle joined Stanford in the Summer of 2004 in the Psychology Department. She has worked in in the School of Medicine, the School of Engineering, and the Law School. She currently works in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies in the Cyber Policy Center. Her skills include calendar management, finances, and event planning. She is a sustaining member of the Junior League of San Jose and recruits/manages volunteers for a local festival in Santa Cruz. In her free time Michelle likes to go camping, attend concerts, and volunteer for several local non-profit organizations.