Laura DeNardis, PhD appointed inaugural director of the Center for Digital Ethics

The Office of the Provost at Georgetown University has announced the appointment of Laura DeNardis, Ph.D., as the inaugural director of the Center for Digital Ethics. The center, established in 2022, is a unique interdisciplinary hub of researchers from computer science, law, data science, the social sciences, and humanities. Its faculty address the pressing ethical implications of emerging technologies as they reshape policy, scholarship, and human experience. The center is co-located on the main campus and the law center at Georgetown University and is part of two on-campus networks: Tech & Society (new window) and the newly formed Emergent Ethics Network (new window).

“Emerging digital technologies are reconfiguring society before our eyes,” Dr. DeNardis explains. “What is at stake in debates over the design and governance of these technologies is no less than the future of democracy, the environment, the economy, national security, and human rights.”

Professor DeNardis joined the Georgetown community in 2022 as the inaugural endowed Chair in Technology, Ethics, and Society in Georgetown’s College of Arts and Sciences and Professor in the Communication, Culture, and Technology program. She is recognized as a leading Internet governance expert in both the United States and the world. Among her seven books are The Internet in Everything: Freedom and Security in a World with No Off Switch (2020) and The Global War for Internet Governance (2014), both published by Yale University Press. Professor DeNardis joined Georgetown from American University, where she served as Professor, Faculty Director of the Internet Governance Lab, Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs, and also Interim Dean of the School of Communication. She previously served as the Executive Director of the Yale Information Society Project and the Research Director of the Global Commission on Internet Governance.

The center’s mission, Dr. DeNardis says, “is to bring about a more ethical future of digital technologies through original research, innovative policy solutions, conceptual frameworks, stakeholder and public engagement, design work, and, of course, educational programming to empower the ethical leaders of the future.”

Professor DeNardis holds an AB in Engineering Science from Dartmouth College, an MEng from Cornell University, a PhD in Science and Technology Studies from Virginia Tech, and was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship from Yale Law School.