Today, I’m pleased to announce CITP’s visitors for the upcoming academic year.

Deven R. Desai, Visiting Fellow: Deven is an Associate Professor of Law at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law, and a permanent blogger at Concurring Opinions. Professor Desai’s scholarship centers on intellectual property, information theory, and Internet-related law. He plans to work on a major project exploring the ways trademark law can foster, or limit, online innovation.

James Katz, Visiting Fellow. Jim is Professor, Chair of the Department of Communication, and Director of the Center for Mobile Communication Studies at Rutgers, where he holds the University’s highest professorial rank. He has devoted much of his career to exploring the social consequences of new communication technology, especially the mobile phone and Internet. Currently he is looking at how personal communication technologies can be used by teens from urban environments to engage in informal science and health learning. This research is being carried out through an NSF-sponsored project with New Jersey’s Liberty Science Center.

Rebecca MacKinnon, Visiting Fellow (spring term): Rebecca is an Assistant Professor at the University of Hong Kong’s Journalism and Media Studies Centre. She is currently on leave, as an Open Society Fellow, to work on a book tentatively titled “Internet Freedom and Control: Lessons from China for the World.” She will spend the spring 2010 semester at CITP, continuing to work on the book. Rebecca is a cofounder of Global Voices, a founding member of the Global Network Initiative, and a former television journalist, having served as CNN’s bureau chief in Beijing and, later, Tokyo.

Jens Grossklags, Postdoctoral Research Associate: Jens, a new PhD from the UC Berkeley School of Information, studies information economics and technology policy. He focuses on the intersection of privacy, security, and network systems. His approach is highly interdisciplinary, combining economics, computer science, and public policy. Currently, he is investigating the ways institutions and end users make decisions about complex computer security risks under conditions of uncertainty and limited information.

Joseph Lorenzo Hall, Visiting Postdoctoral Research Associate: Joe, whose work is supported by the NSF ACCURATE Center, also earned his PhD from the UC Berkeley School of Information. His dissertation examined public policy mechanisms for making computerized voting systems more transparent. He continues to work along the same lines, drawing lessons from voting machines, gaming machines and other technologies on how to best protect users from error and malicious activity.

In addition to these full time appointments, the Center will also welcome two Visiting Research Collaborators on an occasional basis: Alex Halderman, an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Michigan (and recently in the news for his research group’s analysis of China’s Green Dam software), and David Lukens, an attorney who has been collaborating on the Center’s transparency work.

In the next few days, I’ll be writing a post to announce CITP’s visiting fellows for the upcoming 2009-2010 academic year. But first, today, I want to let you know about a change in the Center’s leadership structure. After serving for two years as CITP’s first-ever Associate Director, David Robinson will be leaving us in August to begin law school at Yale. As a result, we are now launching a search for a new Associate Director.

As Associate Director, he helped oversee CITP’s growth into a larger, more mature organization, our move into a great new space in Sherrerd Hall, and two years of our busy activities calendar. He has been an integral part of the Center’s management and its research activities. David has done a fantastic job, and we’ll miss him, but we understand and support his decision to go on to law school as the next stage of his sure-to-be-stellar career. David will remain engaged with the Center’s research, and we expect to cross paths with him often in the future.

The new Associate Director will pick up where David leaves off, taking our Center to the next level in its development. The job is a fabulous opportunity to exercise leadership, vision and dedication: As a startup, we are improvising and learning while we grow, constantly looking for new and better ways to advance the policy debate and public understanding of digital technologies through both technical and policy research. Our first challenge was to get things started—now that we are established, a key priority for the new Associate Director will be building richer and deeper links and collaborations with other faculty members, policymakers, and the tech policy community generally. Here’s the official job description, soon to appear on the University’s “Jobs at Princeton” web site:

The Associate Director serves as a core organizer and evangelist for the Center, both on campus and beyond. Working with the existing Center staff, the Associate Director will develop, plan and execute the Center’s public activities, including lecture series, workshops and policy briefings; recruit visiting researchers and policy experts and coordinate the selection appointment process; cultivate research collaborations, joint public events and other activities to build faculty engagement in the Center; coordinate interdisciplinary grant writing as appropriate; and develop and maintain the Center’s website and other published materials.

One of David’s last projects at the Center will be to coordinate the search process for his replacement. The search will continue until the position is filled: We hope to have the new Associate Director in place by the start of the school year. Applicants should provide a cover letter, CV, and contact information for three references. These materials can be sent to David (or equivalently, once the University’s jobs site has the listing, they can also be submitted through that route). David will also be happy to answer any questions about the position.