Latanya Sweeney

Latanya Sweeney is the Professor of the Practice of Government and Technology at the Harvard Kennedy School and in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Editor-in-Chief of Technology Science, director and founder of the Public Interest Tech Lab and the Data Privacy Lab at Harvard, former Chief Technology Officer at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and Distinguished Career Professor of Computer Science, Technology and Policy at Carnegie Mellon University. Latanya Sweeney has 3 patents, more than 100 academic publications, and pioneered the field known as data privacy. She launched the emerging area known as algorithmic fairness, and her work is explicitly cited in two U.S. regulations, including the U.S. federal medical privacy regulation (known as HIPAA). She is a recipient of the prestigious Louis D. Brandeis Privacy Award, the American Psychiatric Association's Privacy Advocacy Award, an elected fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics, and has testified before government bodies worldwide. She earned her PhD in computer science from MIT in 2001, being the first black woman to do so, and her undergraduate degree in computer science from Harvard University. Dr. Sweeney creates and uses technology to assess and solve societal, political, and governance problems, and teaches others how to do the same.