Shannon Pierson is the Public Interest Cybersecurity Fellow at the UC Berkeley Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity (CLTC). In this role, she leads public interest cybersecurity research and oversees the coordination of the upcoming 2024 Cyber Civil Defense Summit.
Before her current role, Shannon engaged in cyber threat intelligence work, contributing to projects concerning election integrity efforts at both Meta and Microsoft.
Prior to that, Shannon served as an Affiliate for the Minderoo Centre for Technology & Democracy, where she authored a report for UK lawmakers focused on the platform governance, biometric data privacy, and cybersecurity challenges inherent in extended reality technology (i.e.,virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality) and Social VR platforms.
Shannon has also studied online harassment campaigns and foreign influence operations led by nation-states at the Wilson Center’s Science Technology Innovation Program and the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy Program.
During a U.S. State Department fellowship in Germany, she advised computer scientists at the Helmholtz Center for Information Security’s Privacy and Machine Learning Lab throughout the development process of a model capable of identifying multimodal hate speech.
Her research has been published by the University of Cambridge, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the Wilson Center, and the journal Disability & Society.
