Aspen Digital

Katie Harbath is CEO of Anchor Change and senior advisor for Aspen Digital. A global leader at the intersection of policy, democracy, and technology, Katie’s been called an “election whisperer to the tech industry” by Foreign Policy Magazine. Her career spans political campaigns, civil society, and technology. Prior to Anchor Change, Katie spent ten years at Facebook, where she built and led global teams that managed elections and helped government and political figures use the social network to connect with their constituents. 

Before Facebook, Katie held senior digital roles at the Republican National Committee, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, and the DCI Group, as well as multiple campaigns for office.

She is a board member at the National Conference on Citizenship, Democracy Works, R Street and the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Madison-Wisconsin.

Nate Persily is the James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, with appointments in the departments of Political Science, Communication, and Freeman Spogli Institute of International Studies.  Prior to joining Stanford, Professor Persily taught at Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania Law School.  His scholarship and legal practice focus on American election law or what is sometimes called the “law of democracy,” which addresses issues such as voting rights, political parties, campaign finance, redistricting, and election administration. He has served as a special master or court-appointed expert to craft congressional or legislative districting plans for Georgia, Maryland, Connecticut, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and New Hampshire.  He also served as the Senior Research Director for the Presidential Commission on Election Administration. Professor Persily is coauthor of the leading election law casebook, The Law of Democracy (Foundation Press, 6th ed., 2020), and most recently, The Digitalist Papers: Artificial Intelligence and Democracy in America (2024, coedited with Condoleeza Rice, Eric Brynjolfsson, and Alex Pentland). His current work, for which he has been honored as a Guggenheim Fellow, Andrew Carnegie Fellow, and a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, examines the impact of changing technology on political communication, campaigns, and election administration.  He is the founding co-director of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center and its Program on Democracy and the Internet and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 

Gowri Ramachandran serves as Director of Elections and Security in the Brennan Center’s Elections & Government program. Her work focuses on election security, election administration, and combatting election disinformation.

Before joining the Brennan Center, she was professor of law at Southwestern Law School, in Los Angeles, California, where she taught courses in constitutional law, employment discrimination, critical race theory, and the Ninth Circuit Appellate Litigation Clinic. Her work was published in Election Law Journal, North Carolina Law Review, and Yale Law Journal online, among others. She served on the Ninth Circuit’s Fairness Committee, which considers racial, religious, gender, and other disparities in the administration of justice.

Ramachandran received her undergraduate degree in mathematics from Yale College and a master’s degree in statistics from Harvard University. While in law school, she served as editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal. After graduating from law school in 2003, Ramachandran served as law clerk to Judge Sidney R. Thomas of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in Billings, Montana.

Nicole Schneidman is a Technology Policy Strategist at Protect Democracy working to combat anti-democratic applications and impacts of technology, including disinformation. Prior to Protect Democracy, Nicole was Head of Community Product Partnerships at Facebook where she led a team advocating for the needs of community leaders in the development of Facebook’s community product suite and related integrity policies with a focus on Facebook Groups. Nicole earned her JD/MBA from the University of Pennsylvania’s Law and Wharton School and her BA from Georgetown University.

Kim Wyman served as Washington’s 15th Secretary of State from 2013 to 2021 and is only the second Republican woman in state history to be elected to statewide office. Kim is President of ESI Consulting, a company specializing in election security and modernization, and she is a Senior Fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center.

Secretary Wyman’s career in elections began in Thurston County, Washington where she successfully pioneered some of the country’s first vote-by-mail elections and helped lead the state’s transition to universal mail-in elections. She created the first state Elections Security Operations Center, successfully led the bipartisan development of the VoteWA system, and collaborated on many national election administration and cybersecurity initiatives including the Electronic Registration and Information Center (ERIC).

Respected for her leadership, Kim was appointed by Democratic President Joe Biden to serve as the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s Senior Election Security Advisor. She served in that capacity for 19 months before moving to the private sector.

Kim Wyman is a frequent panelist and speaker and has been featured in many interviews and reports, including Anderson Cooper, John King, Major Garrett, ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, NPR, Time, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Politico, USA Today, and The Hill, among others.

Vivian Schiller joined the Aspen Institute in January 2020 as Executive Director of Aspen Digital, which empowers policymakers, civic organizations, companies, and the public to be responsible stewards of technology and media in the service of an informed, just, and equitable world.

A longtime executive at the intersection of journalism, media and technology, Schiller has held executive roles at some of the most respected media organizations in the world. Those include: President and CEO of NPR; Global Chair of News at Twitter; General Manager of NYTimes.com; Chief Digital Officer of NBC News; Chief of the Discovery Times Channel, a joint venture of The New York Times and Discovery Communications; and Head of CNN documentary and long form divisions. Documentaries and series produced under her auspices earned multiple honors, including three Peabody Awards, four Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia University Awards, and dozens of Emmys.

Schiller is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations; and a Director of the Scott Trust, which owns The Guardian.