bio
Marc Canellas is public defender with Office of the Public Defender for Arlington County and Falls Church, Virginia. Much of his current work focuses on how public defenders can leverage data science and scientific and engineering principles to affirm people’s rights, validate lived experiences, and challenge carceral technology. He also serves as the Chair of IEEE-USA’s AI Policy Committee advising federal and state policymakers on AI governance.
He earned his J.D. from NYU School of Law where he was a Jacobson Leadership Program in Law and Business Scholar and Cybersecurity Service Scholar. He was a recipient of the Vanderbilt Medal for outstanding contributions to NYU Law. He co-founded Rights over Tech a student organization focused on ensuring that human and civil rights take primacy over technology and the power structures that create it. He was also an Article Selection Editor for the NYU Review of Law and Social Change.
Prior to law school, Marc was an IEEE/AAAS Congressional Science and Technology Fellow serving in the office of Representative Derek Kilmer (WA-6) where he was responsible for legislation, appropriations, and media for aerospace, cybersecurity, privacy and surveillance, science and technology, AI, and robotics.
Prior to serving in Congress, Marc earned his PhD in aerospace and cognitive engineering working in the Cognitive Engineering Center at the Georgia Institute of Technology School of Aerospace Engineering. There he used mathematical, computational, and human-subjects studies to develop decision support tools for military command and control in degraded and denied information environments.
Marc’s work has been published in technical journals such as IEEE Transactions on Human-Machine Systems, the Journal of Cognitive Engineering and Decision Making, AI Magazine, Communications of the ACM, and the IEEE Technology and Society Magazine; legal, technology, and national security outlets such as Slate, Just Security, and We Robot; and has won awards from the National Science Foundation and the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany. He has also been an invited panelist, speaker, and moderator for the Athens Roundtable, AFL-CIO Texas Constitutional Convention, Practicing Law Institute, All Tech is Human NYC, Penn State’s Center for Security Research and Education Symposium, NYU Law & Tech, and NYU Law’s Center on Civil Justice.
Prior to his J.D. and Ph.D., Marc earned a BS in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Missouri. He tweets @marc_canellas.