Alex Abdo is Litigation Director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. Prior to joining the Institute, he was a senior staff attorney at the ACLU. He has litigated civil liberties cases in multiple federal appeals courts and the U.S. Supreme Court, and he has been at the forefront of litigation relating to free speech online, encryption, government transparency, and NSA surveillance. In 2015, he argued the closely watched appeal that resulted in the Second Circuit invalidating the NSA’s call-records program. He graduated from Yale College and Harvard Law School. After law school, Abdo clerked for the Hon. Barbara M.G. Lynn, United States District Judge for the Northern District of Texas, and for the Hon. Rosemary Barkett, United States Circuit Judge for the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals.

Jack Balkin is Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment at Yale Law School. He is the founder and director of Yale’s Information Society Project, an interdisciplinary center that studies law and new information technologies. He also directs the Abrams Institute for Freedom of Expression and the Knight Law and Media Program at Yale. He founded and edits the blog Balkinization, and has written widely on legal issues for publications including the New York Times, the American Prospect, the Atlantic, and Slate. He is the author or editor of a dozen books; most recently, he published Democracy and Dysfunction (University of Chicago Press, 2019) based on a series of letters between him and Sanford Levison.

Emily Bell is Professor of Professional Practice at Columbia Journalism School and the founding director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism. She is a 20-year veteran of the Guardian News and Media group, where she was a writer and editor at the Guardian and the Observer. As editor-in-chief across Guardian websites and director of digital content for Guardian News and Media, Bell led live blogging, novel multimedia formats, and data and social media, establishing the Guardian as a pioneer in digital journalism. She co-edited Journalism After Snowden: The Future of the Free Press in the Surveillance State (Columbia University Press, 2017) and co-authored “Post Industrial Journalism: Adapting to the Present” (Tow Center, 2012).

Lee C. Bollinger became Columbia University’s nineteenth president in 2002. He is Columbia’s first Seth Low Professor of the University, a member of the Columbia Law School faculty, and Chair (ex officio) of the Knight Institute’s board. From 1996 to 2002, Bollinger was the President of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. He led the school’s historic litigation in Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger, cases concerning affirmative action in higher education. Bollinger is a director of Graham Holdings Company (formerly The Washington Post Company) and serves as a member of the Pulitzer Prize Board. From 2007 to 2012, he was a director of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, where he also served as Chair from 2010 to 2012. Bollinger is widely published and speaks frequently to audiences around the country and across the world. His latest book is The Free Speech Century, co-edited with Geoffrey R. Stone (Oxford University Press, 2018).

Neil Chilson is a Senior Research Fellow for Technology and Innovation at the Charles Koch Institute. Previously, Chilson served as acting chief technologist at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and as an attorney advisor for FTC Commissioner Maureen Ohlhausen. As chief technologist, he focused on informational injury and established the FTC’s Blockchain Working Group. Throughout his four years at the FTC, Chilson was involved in nearly every major technology-related case, report, workshop, or proceeding at the Commission. Previously, Chilson was an attorney at the law firm of Wilkinson Barker Knauer, LLP. Chilson has a J.D. from George Washington University and a M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Cindy Cohn is Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). From 2000 to 2015 she served as EFF’s Legal Director as well as its General Counsel. Cohn first became involved with EFF in 1993, when she served as the outside lead attorney in Bernstein v. Dept. of Justice, the successful First Amendment challenge to U.S. export restrictions on cryptography. In 2018, Forbes included Cohn as one of America’s Top 50 Women in Tech. In 2013, National Law Journal named Cohn one of 100 most influential lawyers in America. Cohn also served as counsel to the plaintiffs in Bowoto v. Chevron, two lawsuits in San Francisco arising from Chevron’s involvement in human rights abuses against environmental protesters in Nigeria.

Steve Coll is Dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where he is also the Henry R. Luce Professor of Journalism, and he is a board member of the Knight Institute. He is a staff writer at the New Yorker, the author of seven books of nonfiction, and a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Between 1985 and 2005, he was a reporter, foreign correspondent and senior editor at the Washington Post, and he served as managing editor between 1998 and 2004. Coll is the author of Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, From the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001, for which he received an Overseas Press Club Award and a Pulitzer Prize. His book, The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century (Penguin Group, 2008), won the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction in 2009 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Biography. His book, Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power (Penguin Books, 2012), won the Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Award as the best business book of 2012.

Daniel Crane is Frederick Paul Furth Sr. Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School. From 2013 to 2016, he also served as the Associate Dean for Faculty and Research. His research and pedagogy focus on contracts, antitrust, intellectual property, and regulation. Crane’s work has appeared in the University of Chicago Law Review, California Law Review, Michigan Law Review, Georgetown Law Journal, and Cornell Law Review, among other journals and publications. He is the author of several academic texts on antitrust law, including Antitrust (Aspen, 2014) and The Making of Competition Policy: Legal and Economic Sources (Oxford University Press, 2013, with Herbert Hovenkamp).

Evelyn Douek is an S.J.D. candidate at Harvard Law School and affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. Her scholarship focuses on international and transnational regulation of online speech and content moderation institutional design. Her research has appeared in numerous outlets, including the Atlantic, North Carolina Journal of Law and Technology, and Federal Law Review. She also blogs at Lawfare. Before joining Harvard to complete a Master of Laws, Douek clerked for Chief Justice Susan Kiefel of the High Court of Australia and worked as a corporate litigator.

Katy Glenn Bass is the Knight Institute’s Research Director. She was previously the Director of PEN America’s Free Expression Research and Policy program, where she supervised the production of reports analyzing free expression issues, including the lack of protections for national security whistleblowers, attacks on journalists covering the 2014 protests in Ferguson, MO, the impact of mass surveillance on online speech, and other topics. Glenn Bass has also taught at NYU Law’s Center for Constitutional Transitions and at the Walter Leitner International Human Rights Clinic at Fordham Law School. She holds a B.A. from Princeton University and a J.D. from Harvard Law School, where she received the Kaufman Pro Bono Service Award.

Ellen P. Goodman is Professor of Law at Rutgers University and Co-Director and co-founder of the Rutgers Institute for Information Policy & Law (RIIPL). Her research interests include smart cities, algorithmic governance, freedom of expression, platform policies, communications architectures, media and advertising law, and transparency policy. Goodman is currently a Senior Fellow at the German Marshall Fund’s Digital Innovation & Democracy Institute. She has served as a Distinguished Visiting Scholar with the Federal Communications Commission and was a partner with the Washington D.C. law firm of Covington & Burling. She is currently working on a book on smart city governance. Her work has appeared in numerous news media and academic journals, including the Guardian, Democracy Journal, Cornell Law Review, Texas Law Review, Harvard Journal of Law & Technology, and Yale Journal of Law & Technology.

Jameel Jaffer is the inaugural director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. Under his leadership, the Institute has brought precedent-setting litigation, published influential research, and become a distinctive voice in debates about free speech in the digital age. Jaffer previously served as deputy legal director at the ACLU, where he litigated cases at all levels of the federal court system and oversaw the organization’s work on free speech, privacy, technology, national security, and international human rights. He is an executive editor of Just Security, a national security blog, and his most recent book, The Drone Memos, was one of the Guardian’s “Best Books of 2016.” He currently serves on the board of the Pierre Elliot Trudeau Foundation, on the advisory board of First Look Media’s Press Freedom Litigation Fund, and on the advisory board of the Center for Democracy and Technology.

Richard John is a Professor at Columbia Journalism School, where he teaches and advises the Ph.D. program in communications, and he is also a member of the core faculty of Columbia’s history department. He has published widely on American political development and the histories of business, technology, and communications; his works include Making News: The Political Economy of Journalism in Britain and America (edited with Jonathan Silberstein-Loeb, Oxford University Press, 2015) and Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications (Belknap Press, 2010). John has been a fellow at the Newberry Library in Chicago and the Smithsonian Institution’s Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC. John is a former President of the Business History Conference, an international professional society dedicated to the study of institutional history.

Lina Khan is Counsel to the U.S. House Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law and an Academic Fellow at Columbia Law School. Khan previously served as a Legal Fellow in the office of Commissioner Rohit Chopra at the Federal Trade Commission and as Director of Legal Policy at the Open Markets Institute. Khan’s scholarship has been published or is forthcoming in the Columbia Law Review, Chicago Law Review, Harvard Law Review, and Yale Law Journal. Her piece “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox” was awarded the 2018 Antitrust Writing Award for “Best Academic Unilateral Conduct Article,” Yale Law School’s Israel H. Peres Prize, and the Yale Law Journal’s Michael Egger Prize. Her current academic work focuses on the way new technologies and business models are challenging current doctrinal assumptions, and how modifying the institutional structure of antitrust enforcement could enable substantive rules to keep pace with evolving market realities.

Ramya Krishnan is a Staff Attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute, where she works on issues related to government transparency, surveillance, and social media. Krishnan joined the Knight Institute as its inaugural legal fellow. She is a graduate of Columbia Law School and the University of Sydney, where she served as an editor of the Sydney Law Review. She previously worked at Australia’s Attorney-General’s Department, where she litigated several constitutional and administrative law cases, including in the High Court of Australia. From 2013-2014, she served as law clerk for the Hon. Robert Beech Jones of the Supreme Court of New South Wales. Her work has been featured in a variety of publications, including the Washington Post, Columbia Journalism Review, and Just Security.

Genevieve Lakier is Assistant Professor of Law and Herbert and Marjorie Fried Teaching Scholar at the University of Chicago Law School. Lakier’s scholarship explores the connections between culture and law; her current research includes an exploration of the cultural history of the First Amendment as well as the state’s changing role in the regulation of sex. Between 2006 and 2008, she was an Academy Scholar at the Weatherhead Center for International and Area Studies at Harvard University. She is the author of “Imagining an Antisubordinating First Amendment” in the Columbia Law Review and has written for the Harvard Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law, and Supreme Court Review.

Casey Mattox is Vice President for Legal and Judicial Strategy at Americans for Prosperity and Senior Fellow for Free Speech at the Charles Koch Institute. In these roles he advocates for a legal system that respects the rule of law and protects individual liberty. Casey is particularly focused on defending free expression. Prior to joining AFP and CKI he litigated to defend First Amendment freedoms in state and federal courts. Mattox has a J.D. from Boston College School of Law and a B.A. in Government and History from the University of Virginia.

Surya Mattu is an investigative data journalist with The Markup. Previously, Mattu was a data reporter at Gizmodo’s Special Projects Desk and a contributing researcher at ProPublica. An engineer by training, he has also worked as a researcher at Bell Labs, Data & Society, and the MIT Media Lab. At ProPublica, he was part of the team that was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting for the series “Machine Bias.” At Gizmodo, “The House that Spied on Me,” a project Mattu worked on with journalist Kashmir Hill, won the National Press Foundation’s 2018 Technology in Journalism Award and was also made into a TED talk.

Paul Matzko is Assistant Editor for Tech and Innovation at Libertarianism.org, a project of the Cato Institute, where he is also a columnist and host of Building Tomorrow, a podcast on emerging technology. He received a Ph.D. in History from Pennsylvania State University in 2016, specializing in the intersection of politics and religion in 20th century America. From 2017 to 2018, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Baylor University Institute for Studies of Religion. The Radio Right, his book about the government campaign to censor conservative radio broadcasters in the 1960s, will be published by Oxford University Press in April 2020.

Susan McGregor is Assistant Director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism and Assistant Professor at Columbia Journalism School. Her courses focus on data journalism, information visualization, algorithms and ethics. Her research work on information security, privacy, and novel news distribution methods has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Knight Foundation, Google, and several programs at Columbia University. She is co-chair of the Data Science Institute’s Center for Data, Media and Society, and a member of the 2019-2020 World Economic Forum Global Future Council on Media, Entertainment and Culture. Her book Information Security Essentials: A Guide for Reporters, Editors and Newsroom Leaders will be published by Columbia University Press in 2020.

Andrea Prat is Richard Paul Richman Professor of Business at Columbia Business School and Professor of Economics at Columbia University. Prat’s research in organizational economics explores issues such as incentive provision, corporate leadership, employee motivation, and organizational language. His recent work in political economy attempts to define and measure the influence of the media industry on the democratic process. In addition to publishing numerous articles in economics and finance journals, Prat served as Chairman and Managing Editor of the Review of Economic Studies. He is also Associate Editor of Theoretical Economics and a director of the Industrial Organization program of the Center for Economic Policy Research. Prat is a Fellow of the Econometric Society and the British Academy.

K. Sabeel Rahman is Associate Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School and President of Demos, a “think-and-do tank” dedicated to addressing issues of racial justice, economic inequality, and democracy. Rahman has served as Special Advisor on strategies for inclusive economic development in New York City and is on the Boards of The New Press, a public-interest non-profit publisher, and United to Protect Democracy, a legal advocacy group battling current threats to American democratic institutions. He co-authored Civic Power: Rebuilding American Democracy in an Era of Democratic Crisis (Cambridge University Press, 2019, with Hollie Russon Gilman), which explores contemporary approaches to organizing, power, and institutional reform. He is the author Democracy Against Domination (Oxford University Press, 2017), which examines how American politics has conceptualized and addressed questions of economic power and inequality from the Progressive Era to the present.

John Samples is a Vice President at the Cato Institute. He founded and directs Cato’s Center for Representative Government, which studies the First Amendment, government institutional failure, and public opinion. His current work focuses on social media and speech regulation, which extends and updates his April 2019 policy analysis, “Why Government Should Not Regulate Content Moderation of Social Media.” Samples is the author of The Struggle to Limit Government: A Modern Political History (Cato, 2010) and The Fallacy of Campaign Finance Reform (University of Chicago Press, 2006). He and his work have been featured in a variety of news outlets, including USA Today, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, NPR, Fox News Channel, and MSNBC.

Vivian Schiller is CEO of the Civil Foundation, an independent not-for-profit committed to the sustainability of trustworthy journalism around the world. Previously, she served as Head of News at Twitter; Senior Vice President and Chief Digital Officer for NBC News, including oversight of NBCNews.com; and President and CEO of National Public Radio. She held the role of Senior Vice President & General Manager at both NYTimes.com and Discovery Times Channel, a joint venture between the New York Times and Discovery Communications. She is a Director of Scott Trust, the parent organization of Guardian News & Media, and a strategic advisor to Craig Newmark Philanthropies.

Ganesh Sitaraman is Chancellor Faculty Fellow and Professor of Law at Vanderbilt Law School and Director of its Program in Law and Government. Sitaraman's current research addresses issues in constitutional, administrative and foreign relations law. From 2011 to 2013, while on leave from Vanderbilt, he served as Elizabeth Warren's Policy Director during her campaign for the Senate, and then as her Senior Counsel in office. He is the author of The Public Option: How to Expand Freedom, Increase Opportunity, and Promote Equality (Harvard University Press, 2019, with Anne Alstott) and The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution (Knopf, 2017), which was named one of the New York Times’s 100 notable books of 2017.

Olivier Sylvain is Professor of Law and Director of the McGannon Center for Communications Research at Fordham University. He is also affiliated with the Center for Law and Information Policy and the Center on Race, Law, and Justice. A specialist in information, communications, and administrative law, his work has appeared in a variety of news outlets, journals, and law reviews, among other media. Before entering academia, Sylvain was a Karpatkin Fellow at the ACLU and a litigation associate at Jenner & Block, in Washington, DC. He is on the board of directors for the ACLU of New York and teaches a class on modern American literature for local incarcerated men.

Zephyr Teachout is Associate Professor of Law at Fordham Law School. She is the author of Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin’s Snuff Box to Citizens United (Harvard University Press, 2014), and the forthcoming Break ‘em Up (All Points Press, 2020). In 2014, she ran for Governor of New York, garnering 34 percent of the vote in the Democratic Primary against incumbent Andrew Cuomo, and in 2018, she was endorsed by the New York Times in her unsuccessful campaign to be New York’s Attorney General. Prior to becoming an academic, she was the National Director of the Sunlight Foundation and a death penalty defense lawyer at the Center for Death Penalty Litigation in Durham, North Carolina.

Tim Wu is Julius Silver Professor of Law, Science and Technology at Columbia Law School. Wu is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times and writes widely on media, technology, and competition policy. He is best known for his pioneering work on net neutrality. He has authored four books, including The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age (Columbia Global Reports, 2018) and The Attention Merchants (Knopf, 2016). Wu has worked at or advised the National Economic Council, the New York Attorney General’s Office, and the Federal Trade Commission. He has been listed as one of America’s 100 most influential lawyers by National Law Journal and recognized in the Politico 50 twice for his political and scholarly contributions.

Ethan Zuckerman is Director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT and Associate Professor of the Practice at MIT Media Lab. His research focuses on the use of media as a tool for social change, the role of technology in international development, and the use of new media technologies by activists. A forceful advocate in the fight against censorship and for free expression online, Zuckerman co-founded the international blogging community Global Voices, which serves as a platform for citizen media from and in more than 150 nations. He is the author of Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection (W.W. Norton, 2013).