Alexa Koenig

Alexa Koenig is Co-Faculty Director of the Human Rights Center (winner of the 2015 MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions), Co-Founder of the Human Rights Center's Investigations Lab, and an Adjunct Professor at UC Berkeley, where she teaches classes that focus on the intersection of emerging technologies and both law and journalism. Her research and commentary have appeared in Foreign Policy, Slate, Foreign Affairs and other periodicals. She is the co-editor of Digital Witness: Using Open Source Information for Human Rights Investigation, Documentation and Accountability (University of Oxford Press 2020); an author, with Victor Peskin and Eric Stover, of Hiding in Plain Sight: The Pursuit of War Criminals from Nuremberg to the War on Terror (UC Press, 2016); the editor, with Keramet Reiter, of Extreme Punishment: Comparative Studies in Detention, Incarceration and Solitary Confinement (Palgrave MacMillan, 2015); and a contributor to The Guantánamo Effect: Exposing the Consequences of U.S. Detention and Interrogation Practices (UC Press, 2009). Alexa has been honored with several awards for her work, including the United Nations Association-SF’s Global Human Rights Award, the Mark Bingham Award for Excellence, and the Eleanor Swift Award for Public Service. She has also been honored with a residency at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center (2019), as a 2020 Woman Inspiring Change by Harvard Law School (2020), as one of “100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics” by Women in AI Ethics (2022), and with diverse grants for her research, including from the National Science Foundation and numerous private foundations. Alexa earned her Ph.D. and M.A. from UC Berkeley’s Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program, her J.D. magna cum laude with a certificate in intellectual property and cyberlaw from the University of San Francisco, and her B.A. summa cum laude from the University of California, Los Angeles.