Fellowship Program

Tech Policy Press 2025 Fellowship Program

Tech Policy Press runs a fellowship program to facilitate global reporting, analysis, and commentary of critical topics at the intersection of tech and democracy in order to inform the public and decision-makers. The program reflects our commitment to promoting new and diverse voices and fostering the debate on issues at the intersection of technology and democracy.

We received over 800 applications for our 2025 cohort. We selected nine fellows from around the world to explore issues and policies related to the governance of artificial intelligence, social media regulation, the intersection of state and corporate power, and digital rights and freedoms.

You can find their bios and published pieces on this page (we will update the page periodically to reflect the fellows’ work).

Anika Collier Navaroli

Anika Collier Navaroli is an award-winning writer, lawyer, and researcher focused on journalism, social media, artificial intelligence, trust and safety, and technology policy. She is currently a Senior Fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University and the McGurn Senior Fellow for Media Integrity at the Consortium on Trust in Media and Technology at the University of Florida. For the past decade, her work has spanned from law firms and think tanks to advocacy organizations and senior policy positions at Twitter and Twitch.

• Through to Thriving: Building Community with Ellen Pao

Ariana Aboulafia

Ariana Aboulafia is an attorney with a strong background in intersectional public interest advocacy, with particular expertise in disability, technology, and journalism. She was first introduced to technology policy while serving as a fellow to the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, where her work included research to further their goal of combating online abuse and protecting civil rights in online spaces. Later, she worked as an assistant public defender in Miami-Dade County, where she provided direct representation to clients facing both misdemeanor and felony criminal charges; she has also served as an officer to the Journalism program at the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, where her portfolio largely focused on safeguarding the First Amendment by providing legal services for journalists.

• Priced Out: How Surveillance Pricing Leaves People with Disabilities At Risk
• DOGE & Disability Rights: Three Key Tech Policy Concerns
• Amidst Flurry Of Anti-DEI Measures, Meta’s Content Moderation Policies Will Harm People With Disabilities

Dia Kayyali

Dia Kayyali (they/them) is a member of the Core Committee of the Christchurch Call Advisory Network, a technology and human rights consultant, and a community organizer. As a leader in the content moderation and platform accountability space, Dia’s work has focused on the real-life impact of policy decisions made by lawmakers and technology companies, with a particular focus on impacts in global majority countries. They have cultivated global solidarity to push back and improve the impact of policies on vulnerable communities, from LGBTQIA+ people to religious minorities. They have also extensively advocated for human rights directly with policymakers in the United States, the European Union, and globally. They previously served as a Senior Case and Policy Officer at the Oversight Board (aka the Facebook Oversight Board), a Policy Director at Mnemonic, a Tech + Advocacy Program Manager at WITNESS, and as an activist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

• Meta’s Oversight Board Gives Hate a Pass
• Ask the Experts: AI Surveillance and US Immigration Enforcement
• AI Surveillance on the Rise in US, but Tactics of Repression Not New
• An Advocate’s Guide to Automated Content Moderation

Eryk Salvaggio

Eryk Salvaggio is a blend of hacker, researcher, designer, and media artist exploring the social and cultural impacts of technology, including artificial intelligence. He is a 2025 visiting professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology's Humanities, Computing, and Design program and an instructor in Responsible AI at the Elisava Barcelona School of Design and Engineering. Alongside research in AI, art, and education at the MetaLab (at) Harvard University, he serves as the Emerging Technology Research Advisor to the Siegel Family Endowment and a 2025 Tech Policy Press fellow. He writes a regular newsletter at cyberneticforests.com.

• Machines Cannot Feel or Think, but Humans Can, and Ought To
• Future Fatigue: How Hype has Replaced Hope in the 21st Century
• Most Researchers Do Not Believe AGI Is Imminent. Why Do Policymakers Act Otherwise?
• The AI State is a Surveillance State
• Anatomy of an AI Coup

Jasmine Mithani

Jasmine Mithani is a journalist focused on making complex ideas accessible to everyone. She has worked as a visual journalist, game developer, civic tech software consultant, alt-weekly editor, and user experience designer. Her experience in journalism spans outlets from national to hyper-local, including FiveThirtyEight, National Public Radio, and South Side Weekly. She is currently a tech and data reporter at The 19th, an independent nonprofit newsroom examining the intersection of gender, politics and policy. Much of her work revolves around core themes of information access, tech-facilitated harms and privacy. Her reporting frequently centers LGBTQ+ perspectives and intersects with reproductive rights. She contributed to The 19th’s 2023 Online Journalism Award-winning coverage of the Dobbs decision, and her visualizations have been long- and short-listed for Information Is Beautiful Awards. Jasmine routinely speaks about best practices in journalism around reporting on mixed-race people, working with data on LGTBQ+ populations and creating accessible data visualizations. She also writes the newsletter Data + Feelings about being data and being human.

• The TAKE IT DOWN Act Is Poised To Become Law. But Will It Provide Justice To Victims?
• Can States Restrict Online Content in the Name of Protecting Children? The Supreme Court Will Weigh In.

Laís Martins

Laís Martins is a Brazilian investigative journalist based in São Paulo. She holds a Bachelor's degree in Journalism and a Master's degree in Political Communication from the University of Amsterdam and the University of Aarhus in Denmark. Her work focuses on technology, human rights, and politics -- and the intersection of these themes. She has published reports in both Brazilian and international media outlets, including The New York Times, The Guardian, and the Associated Press. Currently, she is a reporter at The Intercept Brasil focused on investigations about technology. She was a fellow at the Pulitzer Center, with a project about how Bolsonaro's government's gun policies impacted Brazilian women, and most recently at Rest of World, investigating the intersection between labor and technology in Brazil and Latin America.

• Brazil is Handing Out Generous Incentives for Data Centers, But What it Stands to Gain is Still Unclear
• As Brazil Seeks to Enforce Competition Law Against Digital Platforms, Here's What it Could Learn from the EU
• Why the Rumble Suit Against a Brazilian Justice is Not About Free Speech
• Brazil’s AI Law Faces Uncertain Future as Big Tech Warms to Trump

Megan Kirkwood

Megan Kirkwood is a researcher and writer specializing in issues related to competition and antitrust, with a particular focus on the dynamics of digital markets and regulatory frameworks. Her research interests span technology regulation, digital platform studies, market concentration, ecosystem dependencies, and digital privacy, with a focus on Europe and the UK. She has contributed extensively to Tech Policy Press, including a detailed exploration of the rollout and implications of Europe’s Digital Markets Act. Much of her recent work involves tracking the implementation of this legislation, including conducting an empirical study of gatekeeper compliance that she presented in Brussels. Megan holds an MA in Digital Culture and Society from King’s College London, where she examined the social, political, and economic implications of communication technologies and emerging innovations such as artificial intelligence. Following her studies, she worked as a research and advocacy assistant at the Civil Liberties Union for Europe. She is based in London.

• The UK’s AI Strategy Risks Entrenching the Power of Big Tech
• Understanding the Apple and Meta Non-Compliance Decisions Under the Digital Markets Act
• Digital Markets Act Roundup: March 2025
• As Brazil Seeks to Enforce Competition Law Against Digital Platforms, Here's What it Could Learn from the EU
• Where Does Trump's Takeover of the FTC Leave the Regulation of Big Tech?
• Can Data Portability Shift Power in Europe’s Digital Ecosystem?

Prateek Waghre

Prateek Waghre is a technologist-turned-public policy researcher in India. Most recently, Prateek was the Executive Director / Policy Director at the Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF), a digital rights organisation in India. Prior to IFF, he was a technology policy researcher at The Takshashila Institution. Prateek has also spent nearly a decade in the CDN (content delivery networks) and technology industries in product management and solutions engineering roles before turning to public policy research. He is deeply interested in how technology and its deployment affect liberal democratic societies and spaces. His research interests include the state of the information ecosystem, how the states seek to impose their will on it, and how parts of society seek to exploit the inherent openness of digital spaces; and the evolution of digital rights (privacy, surveillance, free expression) in liberal and authoritarian environments.

• X in India: Censorship, Grok, and Power Play
• A Lack of Sense, and Censor-ability in India

William Burns

William has almost 20 years of experience in science and technology policy at the intersection of health, environment, food, and sustainable energy. His original training was a PhD in malaria biochemistry, followed by an MSc in science communication. More recently, he studied the history of science, technology, and medicine as a Hans Rausing Scholar in Imperial College, London. He worked for nearly a decade in a learned society and in the UK Energy Research Centre, where he was part of a small team promoting the uptake of knowledge and evidence in Whitehall and Brussels, mainly concerned with decarbonization, sustainability, pollution control and public health. He is interested in the intersection of technology and society and how we might shape it for the better as well as how history and path dependency determine current decision making.

• Labor Unions Can Counterbalance the Big Tech Oligarchy, But Only If They Rediscover Their Power
• A Democratic Deficit is Killing Europe’s Digital Industrial Policy, but No One Talks About It
• The Paris AI Action Summit: The Eighteenth Brumaire of Big Tech?
• Salvaging European Technological Sovereignty in a Trump 2.0 World

For more information about the fellowship program, contact Tech Policy Press Program Manager Prithvi Iyer.