Eileen Donahoe

Eileen Donahoe is the co-founder and an affiliated scholar at the Global Digital Policy Incubator (GDPI) at Stanford University's Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law. (Previously, she served as GDPI’s executive director.) GDPI is a global multi-stakeholder collaboration hub for the development of policies that reinforce human rights and democratic values in a digitized society. Current research priorities include: international trends in AI governance, technical methods for aligning AI with democratic norms and standards, evolution of digital authoritarian policies and practices, and emerging blockchain and AI-enabled tools to support democracy.

Eileen served in the Biden administration as US Special Envoy for Digital Freedom at the Department of State. She also served in the Obama administration as the first US Ambassador to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva during a period of significant institutional reform and innovation. After the Obama administration, she joined Human Rights Watch as Director of Global Affairs, where she represented the organization worldwide on human rights foreign policy, with special emphasis on digital rights, cybersecurity, and internet governance. Earlier in her career, she was a technology litigator at Fenwick & West in Silicon Valley.

Eileen serves as Vice Chair of the National Endowment for Democracy Board of Directors; on the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Board of Directors; and on the Dartmouth College Board of Trustees. She is a member of the Global Network Initiative (GNI), the World Economic Forum AI Governance Alliance, and the Resilient Governance and Regulation working group. Previously, she served on the Transatlantic Commission on Election Integrity, the University of Essex Advisory Board on Human Rights, Big Data and Technology, the NDI Designing for Democracy Advisory Board, and the Freedom Online Coalition Advisory Network. Degrees: BA, Dartmouth; J.D., Stanford Law School; MA East Asian Studies, Stanford; M.T.S., Harvard; and Ph.D., Ethics & Social Theory, GTU Cooperative Program with UC Berkeley. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.