Malavika Jayaram
Assistant Professor
SMU School of Law

Malavika joined SMU School of Law in July 2019. She is the inaugural Executive Director of the Digital Asia Hub. Prior to her relocation to Hong Kong, she spent three years as a Fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University: she has been a Faculty Affiliate of the centre since 2017. A technology lawyer for over 15 years, she practised law at Allen & Overy, London, and was Vice President and Technology Counsel at Citigroup. She was featured in the International Who’s Who of Internet e-Commerce & Data Protection Lawyers, and voted one of India’s leading lawyers. She was recently commended in Who’s Who Legal’s “Data 2018: Data Privacy, Protection and Security Analysis” as “highly visible in the market and (…) known for her exceptional expertise in data policy and e-commerce law”.

A graduate of the National Law School of India, Malavika has an LL.M. from Northwestern University, Chicago. She taught India’s first course on information technology and law in 1997, and has taught at Northwestern’s Pritzker School of Law as part of the Master of Science in Law program bridging STEM subjects and the law. She has been a Fellow with the Centre for Internet & Society, India, since 2009 where she helped start their privacy program. She was a Visiting Scholar at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, and has had fellowships at the University of Sydney and the Institute for Technology & Society, Rio de Janeiro.

She is on the Advisory Boards of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and Mozilla’s Tech Policy Fellowship, and on the Executive Committee of the IEEE Global Initiative on Ethics of Autonomous and Intelligent Systems. Malavika is an Associate Fellow with Chatham House (the Royal Institute of International Affairs), as part of its Asia-Pacific Programme. She sits on the High-level Expert Advisory Group to the OECD project, “Going Digital: Making the Transformation Work for Growth and Well-being”. She is a member of the World Economic Forum Global Future Council on Human Rights and Technology for the 2018-2019 term.

Urs Gasser
Professor and Executive Director
Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University

Dr. Urs Gasser is the Executive Director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University and a Professor of Practice at Harvard Law School. His research and teaching activities focus on information law, policy, and society issues and the changing role of academia in the digitally networked age.

Current projects – several involving the Global Network of Internet & Society Centers, which he helped to incubate – focus on the governance of evolving and emerging technologies such as Cloud Computing, the Internet of Things, Augmented Reality, and Artificial Intelligence, with a particular interest in privacy and security issues and the broader implications of these technologies, including questions of agency and autonomy. As a longer-term research interest, he studies the patterns of interaction between law and innovation, and innovation with the legal system in the digital age.

Dr. Gasser has written and edited several books on digital technology issues, and published over 100 articles in professional journals. He is the co-author of “Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives” (Basic Books, 2008 and 2016, with John Palfrey), which has been translated into 10 languages (including Chinese), co-author of “Interop: The Promise and Perils of Highly Interconnected Systems” (Basic Books, 2012, with John Palfrey), and author of a forthcoming book on the future of digital privacy. Recent book publications include Remembering and Forgetting in the Digital Age (Springer, 2018, Co-Editor) and Big Data, Health Law, and Bioethics (Cambridge University Press, 2018, Co-Editor). Additional information about his research can be found on his SSRN author page.

In addition to his appointments at Harvard, Dr. Gasser has had visiting professorships at the Singapore Management University School of Law, the University of Zurich Faculty of Law, KEIO University (Japan) and the University of St. Gallen (Switzerland), and taught at Fudan University School of Management (China). He serves as a trustee on the boards of the Digital Asia Hub, and the Research Center for Information Law at the University of St. Gallen. He was formerly a member of the International Advisory Board of the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society in Berlin, a trustee of the NEXA Center for Internet & Society at the Polytechnic of Turin, a Fellow at the Gruter Institute for Law and Behavioral Research, and served as a Senior Advisor to the World Economic Forum’s Future of the Internet Initiative, where he currently is a Member of the Global Future Council on New Metrics. He currently also serves as a member of the German Digital Council, appointed by Angela Merkel.

Dr. Gasser graduated from the University of St. Gallen (lic.iur., Dr.iur.) as well as Harvard Law School (LL.M. ‘03) and received several academic awards and prizes for his research, including Harvard’s Landon H. Gammon Fellowship for academic excellence and the “Walther Hug-Preis Schweiz,” a prize for the best doctoral thesis in law nationwide, among others. Before returning to the Berkman Klein Center as Executive Director in 2009, he was an Associate Professor of Law at the University of St. Gallen, where he led the Research Center for Information Law as Faculty Director. Prior to his St. Gallen appointment, he spent three years as a resident fellow at the Berkman Klein Center, where he was later appointed Faculty Fellow. He also initiated and chaired the Harvard-Yale-Cyberscholar Working Group, and was a visiting researcher at Harvard Law School.

Dr. Gasser frequently acts as a commentator on digital technology, policy, and society issues for the US and European media.

Alexis Natalie Chun
Co-Founder
Legalese

Akshat Kumar
Assistant Professor
SMU School of Information Systems