Alex Stamos is a cybersecurity expert, business leader and entrepreneur working to improve the security and safety of the Internet. Stamos was the founding director of the Stanford Internet Observatory at the Cyber Policy Center, a part of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He is currently a lecturer, teaching in both the Masters in International Policy Program and in Computer Science.

Prior to joining Stanford, Alex served as the Chief Security Officer of Facebook. In this role, Stamos led a team of engineers, researchers, investigators and analysts charged with understanding and mitigating information security risks to the company and safety risks to the 2.5 billion people on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. During his time at Facebook, he led the company’s investigation into manipulation of the 2016 US election and helped pioneer several successful protections against these new classes of abuse. As a senior executive, Alex represented Facebook and Silicon Valley to regulators, lawmakers and civil society on six continents, and has served as a bridge between the interests of the Internet policy community and the complicated reality of platforms operating at billion-user scale. In April 2017, he co-authored “Information Operations and Facebook”, a highly cited examination of the influence campaign against the US election, which still stands as the most thorough description of the issue by a major technology company.

Before joining Facebook, Alex was the Chief Information Security Officer at Yahoo, rebuilding a storied security team while dealing with multiple assaults by nation-state actors. While at Yahoo, he led the company’s response to the Snowden disclosures by implementing massive cryptographic improvements in his first months. He also represented the company in an open hearing of the US Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

In 2004, Alex co-founded iSEC Partners, an elite security consultancy known for groundbreaking work in secure software development, embedded and mobile security. As a trusted partner to world’s largest technology firms, Alex coordinated the response to the “Aurora” attacks by the People’s Liberation Army at multiple Silicon Valley firms and led groundbreaking work securing the world’s largest desktop and mobile platforms. During this time, he also served as an expert witness in several notable civil and criminal cases, such as the Google Street View incident and pro bono work for the defendants in Sony vs George Hotz and US vs Aaron Swartz. After the 2010 acquisition of iSEC Partners by NCC Group, Alex formed an experimental R&D division at the combined company, producing five patents.

A noted speaker and writer, he has appeared at the Munich Security Conference, NATO CyCon, Web Summit, DEF CON, CanSecWest and numerous other events. His 2017 keynote at Black Hat was noted for its call for a security industry more representative of the diverse people it serves and the actual risks they face. Throughout his career, Alex has worked toward making security a more representative field and has highlighted the work of diverse technologists as an organizer of the Trustworthy Technology Conference and OURSA.

Alex has been involved with securing the US election system as a contributor to Harvard’s Defending Digital Democracy Project and involved in the academic community as an advisor to Stanford’s Cybersecurity Policy Program and UC Berkeley’s Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity. He is a member of the Aspen Institute’s Cyber Security Task Force, the Bay Area CSO Council and the Council on Foreign Relations. Alex also serves on the advisory board to NATO’s Collective Cybersecurity Center of Excellence in Tallinn, Estonia.

Shelby Grossman was a research scholar at the Cyber Policy Center. Her research focuses on online safety. Shelby's research has been published in Comparative Political Studies, PNAS Nexus, Political Communication, The Journal of Politics, World Development, and World Politics. Her book, "The Politics of Order in Informal Markets," was published by Cambridge University Press. She is co-editor of the Journal of Online Trust and Safety, and teaches classes at Stanford on open source investigation and online trust and safety issues. 

Shelby was an assistant professor of political science at the University of Memphis from 2017-2019, and a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law from 2016-17. She earned her Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University in 2016.

Yong Suk Lee was the SK Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Deputy Director of the Korea Program at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University. He served in these roles until June 2021.

Lee’s main fields of research are labor economics, technology and entrepreneurship, and urban economics. Some of the issues he has studied include technology and labor markets, entrepreneurship and economic growth, entrepreneurship education, and education and inequality. He is also interested in both the North and South Korean economy and has examined how economic sanctions affect economic activity in North Korea, and how management practices and education policy affect inequality in South Korea. His current research focuses on how the new wave of digital technologies, such as robotics and artificial intelligence affect labor, education, entrepreneurship, and productivity.

His research has been published in both economics and management journals including the Journal of Urban Economics, Journal of Economic Geography, Journal of Business Venturing, Journal of Health Economics, and Labour Economics. Lee also regularly contributes to policy reports and opinion pieces on contemporary issues surrounding both North and South Korea.

Prior to joining Stanford, Lee was an assistant professor of economics at Williams College in Massachusetts. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from Brown University, a Master of Public Policy from Duke University, and a Bachelor's degree and master's degree in architecture from Seoul National University. Lee also worked as a real estate development consultant and architecture designer as he transitioned from architecture to economics.

While at APARC, Dr. Lee led and participated in several research projects, including Stanford-Asia Pacific Innovation; Digital Technologies and the Labor Market; Entrepreneurship, Technology, and Economic Development; The Impact of Robotics on Nursing Home Care in Japan; Education and Development in the Digital Economy; and New Media and Political Economy.