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Nik Marda

Nik Marda

He/Him
  • Adjunct Lecturer

Contact

nik.marda@northwestern.edu
Website

Academic Area

Technology, People and Policy

Research Interests

AI, Human-Computer Interaction, Public Policy

Biography

Nik Marda is an adjunct lecturer at Northwestern University and Brown University, and a campaign manager for a congressional campaign in southern Minnesota. He previously worked at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in the Biden-Harris Administration, serving as Chief of Staff of the Tech Division and as a Policy Advisor in the National AI Initiative Office. There, he chaired the committee developing the U.S. Government's strategy on AI, and he launched federal initiatives on privacy, digital assets, and civic tech. Afterward, he was the Technical Lead for AI Governance at Mozilla, where he focused on making it easier for developers to build AI responsibly. He holds an M.S. in computer science and a B.A. in political science from Stanford University, and has been named to Apolitical's list of 100 government leaders around the world.

Education

  • M.S., Computer Science, Stanford University
  • B.A., Political Science, Stanford University

Selected Publications

Whiting, M. E., Blaising, A., Barreau, C., Fiuza, L., Marda, N., Valentine, M., & Bernstein, M. S. (2019). Did It Have To End This Way?: Understanding The Consistency of Team Fracture. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 3(CSCW), Article 209.

Longpre, S., Klyman, K., Appel, R. E., Kapoor, S., Bommasani, R., Sahar, M., McGregor, S., Ghosh, A., Blili-Hamelin, B., Butters, N., Nelson, A., Elazari, A., Sellars, A., Casey John Ellis, Sherrets, D., Song, D., Geiger, H., Cohen, I., McIlvenny, L., … Narayanan, A. (2025). In-House Evaluation Is Not Enough: Towards Robust Third-Party Flaw Disclosure for General-Purpose AI. arXiv.Org.

Marda, N., Sun, J., & Surman, M. (2024, September 30). Public AI: Making AI work for everyone, by everyone. Mozilla Foundation.