Alexa Koenig is co-faculty director of UC Berkeley’s Human Rights Center, as well as an adjunct professor in the School of Law and a lecturer in the School of Journalism. She co-founded the Human Rights Center’s Investigations Lab, which has pioneered the use of social media and other online information to strengthen legal investigations and investigative reporting, and she has trained hundreds of war crimes investigators, human rights researchers, and journalists around the world in these methods. She directed development of the Berkeley Protocol on Digital Open Source Investigations, which was released in December 2020 in partnership with the United Nations Human Rights Office to set international standards for online investigations. She is a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Committee on Scientific Freedom and Responsibility, former co-Chair and current advisor to the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Law Committee, a former member of the University of California Presidential Working Group on Artificial Intelligence, and an advisor to a number of organizations working at the intersection of new technologies and human rights. She has been honored with the United Nations Association-SF’s Global Human Rights Award, the Mark Bingham Award for Excellence, as a Woman Inspiring Change by Harvard Law School, and as one of “100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics.” She has a BA with highest honors from UCLA, a JD with a specialization in cyberlaw from the University of San Francisco, and an MA and PhD in Jurisprudence and Social Policy from UC Berkeley. Her most recent books areHiding in Plain Sight (UC Press 2016, co-authored with Eric Stover and Victor Peskin), Digital Witness: Using Open Source Information for Human Rights Investigation, Documentation and Accountability (University of Oxford Press 2020, co-edited with Sam Dubberley and Daragh Murray), and Graphic: Trauma and Meaning in our Online Lives (University of Cambridge Press 2023, co-authored with Andrea Lampros).
Alexa Koenig, JD, PhD
