Moderator
Leisel Bogan is a Fellow in the Technology and Public Purpose program at the Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. Before joining the TAPP Fellowship, she led the first Congressional Digital Service pilot fellowship for TechCongress within the House Select Committee on Modernization, which resulted in the recent creation of a permanent House Digital Services organization, the first of its kind in the United States. Prior to her current role, she served as the Senior Fellow for Cybersecurity, Technology and National Security in the office of Senator Mark Warner. Before Congress, she focused on global strategy for cybersecurity and technology transformation at the professional services firm, PwC. She has held two academic appointments at Stanford University where she researched cybersecurity and emerging technologies, national security, and international institutions, and exhibited work at the International Criminal Court. She has worked at Palantir Technologies and at Warner Bros. Entertainment, in new media technologies, and served as former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s Chief of Staff and her director of research at Stanford University. At the geopolitical consulting firm, RiceHadleyGates, LLC, she advised clients on technology, strategy and emerging markets. Her work has taken her throughout the EU, the Southern Caucasus, Asia, and MENA. She has written for various publications and has spoken at a DEFCON village, for the National Academy of Sciences, Pepperdine University, and Penn State Law. She studied at the University of San Francisco’s School of Law, holds a graduate degree from Pepperdine University, and graduated Magna Cum Laude from California State University. She was a Term Member at the Council on Foreign Relations and a 2016 Gabr Foundation Fellow. Since high school she has volunteered and worked for organizations that help vulnerable populations, especially children. She began her career at age five in television and print advertising.
Speakers
Victoria Houed is currently building out a robust technology policy collective within Schmidt Futures, a philanthropy created by the ex-CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt.
She previously worked for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as a TechCongress Congressional Innovation Fellow supporting the Speaker on all things tech, including internet accessibility, data privacy, antitrust, disinformation, Section 230, and autonomous vehicles. Throughout her fellowship she negotiated COVID Relief bills, is credited within the House Antitrust Subcommittee’s Investigation of Competition in the Digital Marketplace, and co-wrote a report on foreign influence campaigns targeting US elections which passed into law through the National Defense Authorization Act of 2021.
Before her time in Congress, Victoria worked as a Software Engineer and Product Manager at Cards Against Humanity, founded a non-profit for Black Women in Technology called BlackByte, helped lead the tech team of a mayoral campaign, and enjoyed working on different engineering projects for artists around her hometown of Chicago.
Victoria holds her B.S. in Industrial Engineering from Purdue University, where she focused on nanotechnology and systems engineering.
Anna Lenhart serves as Congresswoman Lori Trahan’s (MA-03) Senior Policy Advisor covering Technology and Energy issues. Her portfolio includes privacy, online safety, research and development. She previously served with the House Judiciary Committee Antitrust Subcommittee under Chairman David Cicilline (D-RI) and supported work on the Digital Markets antitrust investigation.
Anna is committed to the equitable development and implementation of technological systems. She was most recently a Senior Consultant and the AI Ethics Initiative Lead for IBM’s Federal Government Consulting Division, training data scientist and operationalizing principles of explainability, fairness and data-subject rights in AI and Machine Learning systems. She has researched the human right to freedom from discrimination in algorithms, public views on autonomous vehicles and AI's impact on the workforce.
She holds a master’s degree from Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan and a BS in Civil Engineering and Engineering Public Policy from Carnegie Mellon University. Prior to graduate school, Anna was the owner of Anani Cloud Solutions, a consulting firm that implemented and optimized Salesforce.com for non-profit organizations. She was the Founder of the Next Generation of Service, a non-profit online alternative career center focused on Service Years. Her early career centered on alternative energy and included studying waste-to-energy systems in Namibia on a Fulbright Grant and working at a bio-fuel start-up.
Ishan Mehta is a Legislative Assistant for U.S. Senator Brian Schatz in Washington, D.C. He has worked on legislation and oversight of a number of technology and telecom issues including privacy, platform governance, broadband access, and cybersecurity. He worked as an engineer in California, before pivoting to public policy. In his last job, he worked on cybersecurity and national security issues at a non-profit think tank. He has an M.S. in Public Policy and Computer Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Additional Speakers To Be Confirmed
