Ishan Sharma
Ishan Sharma is a Herbert Scoville Jr. Peace Fellow of Emerging Technologies at the Federation of American Scientists. He holds a B.S. from Cornell University and has studied jurisprudence and human rights law at the University of Oxford.
Under FAS President Dr. Ali Nouri, Ishan is leading the Project on Emerging Technologies and International Security. As leadership in the era of AI must proceed by example, Ishan is convening a multi-stakeholder report and roundtable to counter digital authoritarianism by bridging domestic and foreign policy on digital surveillance reform. He is also staffed on the Disinformation Research Group and is a Project Advisor at the Day One Project, an all-star team curating key science and technology proposals for the Biden-Harris Administration’s transition.
Naturally, much of his work focuses on information controls and digital surveillance, China’s techno-geopolitical ecosystem and influence over digitizing countries, and the future of the Internet, democracy, and human rights. In particular, he’s been published on China’s strategic exports in the political economy of AI surveillance, co-authored a prize-winning piece for the 2020 Security Models “Era of Covid” policy competition at New America and written on China’s Internet sovereignty agenda in Responsible Statecraft. He was also the only undergraduate invited to present a variant of his research at Cornell TEDx.
He has spent a year organizing a summit to raise awareness on child sex trafficking occurring in Ithaca as a John Lewis Fellow, and is now a Senior Fellow with Humanity in Action. He is also the youngest member on the board of the global service-mentorship non-profit Titus Mentoring, which aims to build integrity in students through unpacking our privileged experiences and serving hand-in-hand with communities abroad. His grant-funded college thesis, “Colored Lenses,” investigated the influence of racial stereotypes on our perceptions of conflict with one another, and is currently tracking for publication in the Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes journal.