A little about me…

Hello! I'm Laura - a researcher, writer, and leader working at the intersection of AI, media, and society. I’ve spent my career asking who gets to shape technology and in whose interest, working across civil society, government, and academia to help answer it. Twelve cities across four continents later, I'm based in Massachusetts, leading the Harvard Kennedy School Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy where we study how emerging technologies shape what people know, believe, and decide.

I hope we get a chance to connect.

Official Bio

Laura Manley is the Executive Director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, where she leads research on how AI and emerging media shape what people know, believe, and decide. Her writing on these questions has appeared in TIME, the Washington Post, and the World Economic Forum.

Before Shorenstein, Laura was the Inaugural Director of the Technology and Public Purpose Project at Harvard's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, an initiative she built under former Secretary of Defense Ash Carter to address the risks and consequences of emerging technologies including AI. She convened a leadership council that included executives from Google, Microsoft, IBM, and Salesforce alongside civil liberties leaders and government officials, and testified before Congress twice on improving science and technology capacity in government.

Earlier in her career, she co-founded the Center for Open Data Enterprise in Washington, DC, working with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, more than a dozen federal agencies, and eight national governments on data policy. She has also served as a Senior Consultant to the World Bank Group and the United Nations.

Laura teaches executive education on data and AI decision-making at Harvard's Division of Continuing Education and has taught at NYU Wagner School of Public Policy and Columbia School for Professional Studies. She holds a Master of Public Administration from NYU Wagner and a Bachelor of Business Administration from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Recent Writing