Heather West ’07
Equipped with degrees in both computer and cognitive science from Wellesley College, Heather focuses on data governance, data security, artificial intelligence (AI), and privacy in the digital age. She is a subject matter authority who has written extensively about AI and other data-driven topics for over a decade. She is also a member of the Washington Post's The Network, "a group of high-level digital security experts" selected to weigh in on pressing cybersecurity issues.
An information privacy professional, Heather has led standards and policy efforts around emerging technologies throughout her career. She previously served as the director of the privacy policy team at Meta, leading policy development around the company's work to develop privacy-protective product experiences, building policy frameworks that create accountability, and promoting privacy-protective decision making across the company.
Earlier in her career, Heather helped found the public policy team at Cloudflare and served as the global and federal privacy and security issue expert at Google. She started her career working on government technology, privacy, and identity management at a public interest group focused on the rights of individual users in relation to technical policy.