MELODY CHEN
Melody Chen graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) in June 2024 with a double major in Statistics & Data Science and Philosophy. During her time at UCSB, Melody was a research assistant in the Department of Communication, where she co-authored a forthcoming research paper on news media and partisan social sorting with Dr. Dan Lane in the Digital Political Inequality Lab. She presented the project at the 2024 American Political Science Association Annual Meeting in Philadelphia as part of her work in the lab. Her undergraduate projects include a policy proposal on U.S. export controls on advanced computing semiconductors and a machine learning model for fake news detection, where she analyzed language and emotion patterns in news headlines.
Her academic journey was complemented by a research internship with the Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technology Initiative at the Brookings Institution, where she was acknowledged for assisting with content analysis, editing, and data graphics on reports about misinformation in American political podcasts and Russian state-backed propaganda in Latin America (the former topic was featured in The New York Times here and here). During that time, she also led an interactive data visualization workshop with Brookings fellow, Valerie Wirtschafter.
In her senior year at UCSB, Melody contributed to a legal database project led by former Mayer Brown partner, Dominique Shelton Leipzig, tracking draft AI legislation and regulatory frameworks across 100 countries, with particular focus on the ongoing proceedings of the EU AI Act. Through this work, she engaged with legal professionals from the International Association of Privacy Professionals as well as Mayer Brown’s offices in Washington, D.C. and Hong Kong. She also played a key role in planning and executing the second annual Digital Trust Summit, supporting program development and speaker engagement alongside Dominique. In this role, she helped coordinate discussions on global AI governance with leaders from government, industry, and civil society—including three U.S. senators, United Nations representatives, and CEOs of Fortune 100 companies.
Additionally, she drafted talking points and reviewed literature on data disaggregation among the Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AA and NHPI) community for the White House Initiative on AA and NHPI as an intern for the President’s Advisory Commission. She has also written in newsrooms for her hometown paper, Los Altos Town Crier, and college newspaper, The Daily Nexus. Beyond journalism, she also enjoys engaging with philosophical arguments and creative prose in her Substack newsletter.