As a chancellor’s public scholar at UC Berkeley and continuing lecturer at the Haas School of Business, David Evan Harris teaches courses such as AI Ethics for Leaders, Social Movements & Social Media, Civic Technology, and Scenario Planning & Futures Thinking. Harris is also a senior research fellow at the International Computer Science Institute, a senior advisor for AI ethics at the Psychology of Technology Institute, and an affiliated faculty member with the CITRIS Policy Lab, Center for Latin American Studies, Center for Equity, Gender, and Leadership (EGAL), and the Business and Public Policy Group at UC Berkeley.
In his previous role at Meta (formerly Facebook), Harris managed teams of quantitative and qualitative researchers working on responsible AI, social impact and civic integrity. During his close to five years with the company, he and his teams covered topic areas including AI fairness and inclusion; AI governance and accountability; global election integrity; misinformation; coordinated inauthentic behavior; hate speech; human rights; political violence; harassment and online safety for activists, journalists and politicians; community organizing; civic participation; racial justice; authoritative information; and volunteering and nonprofit organizations.
At the Institute for the Future (IFTF), Harris served as research director, leading research on the future of media, philanthropy, governance, international development and social movements from 2008–18. He studied at the University of São Paulo (M.S., sociology) and UC Berkeley (B.A., political economy of environment and development). As a student, he was an intern at the White House Council on Environmental Quality and a confidential assistant at the Natural Resources Division of the Office of Management and Budget.
Harris is formally trained in sociology and specializes in methods such as ethnography, in-depth interviews, aggregation of expert opinion, survey design, scenario planning, signals scanning, multistakeholder workshop facilitation and content analysis.
In 2004, Harris founded the Global Lives Project, a network of people working to build a video library of daily life around the world. He continues to support the Global Lives project with help of talented teams of UC Berkeley students through the Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship Program.