About

Brandie Nonnecke, PhD is Senior Director of Policy at Americans for Responsible Innovation.

She was the Founding Director of the CITRIS Policy Lab, headquartered at UC Berkeley. She served as an Associate Adjunct Professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy (GSPP) where she directed the Tech Policy Initiative to strengthen tech policy education, research, and impact. She was a faculty co-director at the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology at Berkeley Law where she led the Project on Artificial Intelligence, Platforms, and Society. She also co-directed the UC Berkeley AI Policy Hub,  an interdisciplinary initiative training researchers to develop effective AI governance and policy frameworks. She serves on the California Privacy Protection Agency Board, which protects consumers’ privacy and enforces the law against businesses that violate consumers’ privacy rights.

Brandie is the host of TecHype, a groundbreaking video and podcast series that cuts through the hype around emerging technologies to get to what matters. Each episode debunks misunderstandings around emerging tech, provides insight into the real benefits and risks, and identifies technical and policy strategies to harness emerging tech for good.

Brandie served as a Technology and Human Rights Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. She also completed fellowships at the Schmidt Futures International Strategy Forum,  Aspen Institute’s Tech Policy Hub, and the World Economic Forum.

Her research has been published in Science, Wired, Telecommunications Policy, the Journal of Information Technology and Politics, among other outlets. Her work has been cited by the FTC, NIST, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, as well as in the Washington Post, BBC, NPR, among other venues. Brandie received the SF Business Times INSPIRE Award for her leadership in AI in 2024 and was named one of the 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics in 2021.

Brandie has expertise in information and communication technology (ICT) law, policy, and governance.  Her current work primarily focusing on responsible AI and platform governance. She has published research on compelled platform data transparency for research and oversight, computational propaganda tactics targeting contentious political issues before an election; algorithmic-based decision-making for public service provision in the urban context; how AI can enhance and augment human labor, especially for aging populations and individuals with disabilities; and outlined recommendations for how to better ensure applications of AI benefit society.

She also investigates how information and communication technologies (ICTs) can support civic participation, improve governance and accountability, and foster economic and social development. In this capacity, she designs and deploys participatory evaluation platforms that utilize statistical models and collaborative filtering to tap into collective intelligence and reveal novel insights, including the California Report Card launched in collaboration with the Office of California Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom and the DevCAFE system launched in Mexico, Uganda, and the Philippines to enable participatory evaluation of the effectiveness of development interventions. Her research on the impacts of collaborative filtering for development evaluation received the 2015 IEEE Global Humanitarian Tech Best Paper Award and was featured in the Stanford Social Innovation Review.

Brandie completed a postdoc at UC Berkeley under the supervision of Dr. Camille Crittenden and Prof. Ken Goldberg. She received her PhD in Mass Communications from the College of Communications at Penn State where she also served as Research Fellow for the Institute for Information Policy. Her dissertation research investigated the role of the East Africa Internet Governance Forum in influencing ICT policy harmonization within the East African Community (published in Telecommunications Policy). She holds an MS degree in Journalism and Mass Communication with a minor in Technology and Social Change from Iowa State University.