Aditi Kumar is Executive Director of the Belfer Center. Prior to coming to the Belfer Center, Kumar was a Principal at Oliver Wyman, a management consultancy, in the financial services and public policy practices. She worked primarily with U.S. commercial and investment banks as well as U.S. regulators and policymakers on designing and implementing financial and economic policy. Kumar previously served as a project manager at the World Economic Forum, responsible for leading policy discussions among financial sector executives and policymakers on managing financial risk and designing effective global financial regulation. Kumar is a graduate of the Harvard Kennedy School and the Harvard Business School, where she studied international affairs, and specifically the nexus of national security and financial and economic policy. She previously worked at the International Affairs office of the U.S. Department of the Treasury, focused on assessing the public debt sustainability of Eastern European nations. She graduated from the Huntsman Program for International Studies and Business at the University of Pennsylvania with a Bachelor of Science in Economics and a Bachelor of Arts in International Studies.
Vanessa Rhinesmith is the Associate Director for digital HKS. Led by Faculty Director, David Eaves, digital HKS is an independent project at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs that is committed to understanding the relationship between digital tech, data, and rights as it relates to the public interest.
Prior to digital HKS, Vanessa was the Program Manager for the Ford-Mozilla Open Web Fellows program a ten-month fellowship program that brings together technology talent and civil society organizations from around the world to advance, protect, and enable the open internet. She supported activist-technologists on the front lines of the open internet movement within civil society organizations from around the globe.
Vanessa has an MBA from Simmons School of Management and BA in Marketing from Fairfield University. She is currently pursing her MPP from Simmons University with a focus on intersectional feminism, human rights, and technology. Her research agenda focuses on feminist approaches to cyber security and surveillance as well as the role of history, narrative, and power in the creation of sex trafficking policy in the United States. She is currently co-chair of the 16th annual Community Informatics Research Network (CIRN) Conference.
James Shires is a research fellow at the Belfer Center's Cyber Security Project and a DPhil candidate (expected 2018) in International Relations at the University of Oxford. His research examines cybersecurity in the Middle East, focusing on the interaction between threats to individuals, states and organizations, new regional dynamics, and the development of cybersecurity expertise. He holds an MSc from Birkbeck College, University of London, and a BA from the University of Cambridge.
