Jaclyn A. Kerr

Jaclyn A. Kerr is a nonresident fellow with the Brookings Foreign Policy program, where she is affiliated with the Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology and the Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technology Initiative. She is also the senior research fellow for defense and technology futures at the Center for Strategic Research at National Defense University, and an affiliate with the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. Her research and policy advising focus on digital and emerging technologies and their current and future impacts on international politics, national security, and democracy.  Particular areas of interest include: cybersecurity and cyber conflict; disinformation and cyber-enabled information operations; digital illiberalism; online extremism and social media platform governance; artificial intelligence; Russian digital strategy; information and communications technology in civil society and protest mobilization; emerging technologies and crisis stability; science and technology innovation and social entrepreneurship; and the roles of science, technology and innovation in U.S. foreign policy. 

Kerr has worked for over a decade on emerging technologies, technology policy, and their intersection with international politics. In 2019-20, she served as an AAAS science and technology policy fellow at the U.S. Department of State’s Office of the Science and Technology Advisor to the Secretary where she advised on digital technology policy, particularly as it pertains to human rights, democracy, and national security. She also contributed to efforts concerning science and technology innovations to address community challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic. From 2016 to 2019, she was a research fellow at the Center for Global Security Research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where she led work on cybersecurity, cyber domain strategy, and information conflict. She also has contributed as a policy advisor to the U.S. Cyber Solarium Commission, was a member of the Brookings Institution’s High Level Trans-Atlantic Working Group on Disinformation, was a New America cybersecurity fellow, and has been a research collaborator on projects with Stanford University’s Center for Deliberative Democracy and Global Digital Policy Incubator.

Kerr was previously a cybersecurity fellow at Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, a visiting scholar at Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, and has held research fellowships in Russia, Kazakhstan, and Qatar. She has prior professional experience as a software engineer and research development engineer with Symantec and Comcast respectively. She holds a doctorate and master’s in government from Georgetown University; and a master’s in Russian, East European, and Eurasian studies; and a bachelor’s in mathematics and in Slavic languages and literatures from Stanford University.

Affiliations:
Stanford University Center for International Security and Cooperation, affiliate