James Mickens is the Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University. His research focuses on the performance, security, and robustness of large-scale distributed web services — including how trusted hardware and new operating-system interfaces can let users constrain how datacenters manipulate sensitive data.
He received a B.S. in computer science from the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, spent six years as a researcher at Microsoft, and was a visiting professor at MIT. He is also the creator of Mickens-do, a martial art so deadly that he refuses to teach it to anyone (including himself).
Meg Marco
Director
Meg Marco is the director of the Applied Technology Lab at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Technology. She is a technologist with a background in investigative journalism, leading projects with an emphasis on protecting sensitive information in real-world systems. Most recently she was the director of the Applied Social Media Lab at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center, where she oversaw technical projects focused on privacy-preserving interoperable identity systems, encrypted collaboration, consumer data safety, and applied AI infrastructure for improved public discourse. As a masthead editor at The Wall Street Journal, she founded and staffed the newsroom’s first AI and machine learning lab. She has presented at conferences on the practical aspects of privacy-preserving document authentication, whistleblower authentication and safety, and applied media law.
Meg has also held senior editorial positions at WIRED, ProPublica and Axios, and is the host and co-executive producer of The Extortion Economy, an investigative cybersecurity podcast from ProPublica and MIT Technology Review that was nominated for an Ambie for best knowledge, science or technology podcast. At ProPublica her work was honored with the 2021 National Magazine Award for Social Media, and she co-edited the coverage of the coronavirus pandemic that was a finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.
Team
Team
Yajaira Gonzalez
Product Manager
Yajaira Gonzalez is a Product Leader at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), where she leads Responsible AI and Product Strategy, translating emerging technologies into trustworthy, real-world innovations.
With over 15 years of experience spanning industry, startups, academia, and research centers, Yajaira combines strategic product leadership with deep technical expertise in artificial intelligence, machine learning, data science, high-performance computing, and software engineering. She has led product strategy and the development of innovative technologies at organizations including IBM, Meta, and Affectiva (an AI startup spun out of the MIT Media Lab), and most recently through the Applied Social Media Lab initiative at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School.
Her work spans a diverse portfolio of emerging technologies, including recommendation systems, emotion AI, autonomous vehicles, virtual reality, analytics platforms, and digital identity systems. Yajaira excels at bridging product strategy, research, and engineering to translate advanced technologies into high-impact, real-world solutions.
A Harvard alumna with research and teaching experience at both Harvard and MIT, Yajaira is dedicated to advancing Responsible AI by building trustworthy AI systems that prioritize fairness, transparency, accountability, privacy, safety, and meaningful societal impact.
Alberto Leon
Senior Engineer
Alberto Leon builds privacy-preserving digital trust systems that enable people — not platforms — to hold, present, and verify credentials about themselves and their relationships. He leads core engineering on wallet-based identity architectures, Verifiable Credentials, and Verifiable Relationship Credentials, work that underpins Keyring.
He is actively engaged with the Linux Foundation's Decentralized Trust ecosystem and broader standards communities shaping credential exchange, hardware-backed trust, and peer-to-peer verification. Alberto holds an engineering degree from Tecnológico de Monterrey; across his work, the unifying principle is restoring agency to individuals in digital systems.
Brendan Miller
Principal Engineer
Brendan is Principal Engineer at the Applied Technology Lab at Harvard's School of Engineering and an affiliate of Harvard's Berkman Klein Center. Brendan is innovating how people and AI agents establish trust and collaborate online.
Keyring: Brendan leads research and development on user-owned identity that enables people to form and manage their social networks and delegated agents in a verified, portable, and private manner, and prove specific facts (e.g. their age, an account they control, that they met someone in person) without handing over the underlying data. Our open-source reference implementation is built on peer-to-peer relationship credentials and a graduated model of trust. Brendan authored the underlying Decentralized Trust Graph Credentials specification in collaboration with the Trust over IP Foundation's Decentralized Trust Graph Working Group. The same primitives work for individuals, communities, organizations, and AI agents, seating humans and AI agents on one trust substrate.
LLM Engine (https://asml.cyber.harvard.edu/llm-engine/): Brendan is also the initiator and Principal Engineer on LLM Engine, a flexible service for deploying LLM agents into live group conversations across Slack, Zoom, and NextSpace. The focus is agents that facilitate and enhance discussion for users with diverse goals and needs. Brendan was also a co-author of Mapping LLM Tools for Public Discourse, Pluralism & Social Cohesion(2025).
A technologist with a civic mission, Brendan applies deep experience from the private and public sectors to these challenges, having served as Chief Software Architect for Fortune 500 clients and as the Director of the Office of Science and Technology for the State of New Mexico. He holds a Math-Computer Science degree from Brown, an MPA from Harvard, and an MBA from MIT.
Harvard Gazette — on the launch of the Keyring wallet and the case for user-owned identity.
Proof Street: Trust That Scales With the Stakes — an in-depth look at Keyring's architecture, graduated trust signals, and the work of building a usable decentralized trust layer.
Nora Trapp
Senior Engineer
Nora Trapp is an engineer and applied cryptographer at Harvard's John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), working at the intersection of technology and human rights.
Her research stems from a core belief that privacy is a fundamental human right, and that privacy-preserving technologies should be accessible, usable, and a default part of the applications we use every day. Her current research focuses on Encrypted Spaces, a new cryptographic architecture for end-to-end encrypted collaborative applications, as well as other privacy-preserving tools that protect dissidents, whistleblowers, and everyday users.
Throughout her career, Nora has built practical cryptographic systems for real-world use. At the Signal Foundation, she designed and implemented core systems including usernames and groups, and collaborated with members of marginalized communities, including women in Iran and Afghanistan, to develop privacy tools that enable safer communication under authoritarian regimes. At Juicebox , she designed an open-source encryption key recovery protocol combining usability with novel cryptographic techniques. At the Applied Social Media Lab at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, she researched Encrypted Spaces and other privacy technologies, including secure infrastructure for whistleblowing.
Nora is also deeply committed to fostering inclusive and creative communities. She served as the long-time President of Double Union, a feminist hacker/maker space in San Francisco, and co-founded Cape Cod Makers, a nonprofit supporting maker culture through community events, shared resources, and maker spaces in schools and libraries.
