Alissa Cooper

Executive Director, Knight-Georgetown Institute

Alissa Cooper is the Executive Director of the Knight-Georgetown Institute (KGI), a center at Georgetown University that connects independent research with technology policy and design. Alissa has been a leader in the development of global Internet policy, standards, and governance for nearly two decades. Prior to her appointment at Georgetown, she served as Vice President of Technology Policy and Vice President of Technology Standards at Cisco and in a variety of leadership roles in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), including serving as IETF Chair from 2017 to 2021. At Cisco she was responsible for driving privacy and policy strategy within the company’s portfolio of real-time collaboration products before being appointed as IETF Chair. Prior to joining Cisco, Alissa served as the Chief Computer Scientist at the Center for Democracy and Technology, where she was a leading technology policy advocate on issues related to privacy, net neutrality, and technical standards. Alissa holds a PhD from the Oxford Internet Institute and MS and BS degrees in computer science from Stanford University. She currently serves on the board of The Tor Project.