Seeta Peña Gangadharan, a Data & Society advisor, is associate professor in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE, where she also serves as deputy head of department (research) and programme director for MSc media and communications (governance). Her work focuses on  inclusion, exclusion, and marginalization, as well as questions around democracy, social justice, and technological governance. She currently co-leads two projects: Our Data Bodies, which examines the impact of data collection and data-driven technologies on members of marginalized communities in the United States; and Justice, Equity, and Technology, which explores the impacts of data-driven technologies and infrastructures on European civil society. She is a visiting scholar in the School of Media Studies at The New School and an affiliated fellow of Yale Law School’s Information Society Project.

Before joining LSE in 2015, Peña Gangadharan was senior research fellow at New America’s Open Technology Institute, addressing policies and practices related to digital inclusion, privacy, and “big data.” Before OTI, she was a postdoctoral associate in law, and a MacArthur fellow, at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project. Her research has been supported by grants from Digital Trust Foundation, Institute of Museum and Library Services, Ford Foundation, Open Society Foundations, Stanford University’s Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, and the US Department of Commerce’s Broadband Technology Opportunities Program. She received her PhD from Stanford University and holds an MSc from the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science.