Nick Merrill
Research Fellow, Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity
Nick Merrill is a research fellow at the UC Berkeley Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity and Director of the Daylight Security Research Lab. His academic training spans computer security, human-computer interaction, and design research; his career has taken him through brain-computer interface, virtual reality, authentication, and cryptography.
The Daylight Security Research Lab aims to shift the way people understand, identify, and implement safeguard against harms—and expands the kinds of decision-makers able to do so. By generating novel tools, practices, and representations, the lab makes “security” specific and actionable to those who need it. Innovative projects of DSRL include the Cybersecurity Arts Contest, the card game Adversary Personas, and a series of curricula addressing machine learning failures and algorithmic bias (MLFailures). Nick pioneered early work on measuring Internet fragmentation.
Nick completed his PhD at UC Berkeley’s School of Information with a dissertation entitled Mind-Reading and Telepathy for Beginners and Intermediates: What People Think Machines Can Know About the Mind and Why Their Beliefs Matter. Nick’s research publications are openly available at his Google Scholar profile, and he regularly posts to his Substack blog.
