Portrait of a smiling woman with blonde hair.

Alexa Koenig

Co-Faculty Director; Director, Investigations Program

Human Rights Center

Bio

Alexa Koenig, PhD, MA, JD, is Co-Faculty Director of the Human Rights Center; Director of HRC’s Investigations Program; and Research Professor of Law at Berkeley Law, where she teaches classes that focus on the intersection of emerging technologies and human rights; and a lecturer in the investigative reporting program at Berkeley Journalism. Alexa co-founded the Investigations Lab, which trains students and professionals to use social media and other digital open source content to strengthen human rights research, reporting, and accountability. Alexa is an advisory board member of Physicians for Human Rights, a member of the Technology Advisory Board for the Innovation Lab at Human Rights First, and a co-founder of the University of California Digital Investigations Network. She previously helped establish and co-chaired  the Technology Advisory Board of the Office of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Court; co-chaired the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Law Committee; served on the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Committee on Scientific Freedom and Responsibility; and was a member of the University of California’s Presidential Working Group on Artificial Intelligence, for which she co-chaired the Human Resources subcommittee. Alexa has been honored with several awards for her work, including the United Nations Association-SF’s Global Human Rights Award, UC Berkeley’s Mark Bingham Award for Excellence, and the Eleanor Swift Award for Public Service. She has also been honored with a residency at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center (2019), with multiple writing residencies at Mesa Refuge, as a Woman Inspiring Change by Harvard’s Women’s Law Association (2020), and as one of “100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics” by Women in AI Ethics (2022). She directed development of the Berkeley Protocol on Digital Open Source Investigations and has conducted trainings on open source investigation methods at organizations around the world. Alexa has a BA from UCLA in World Arts and Cultures summa cum laude, a JD from the University of San Francisco with a specialization in cyberlaw and intellectual property magna cum laude, and both an MA and a PhD from UC Berkeley’s Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program with honors.

Books

Publications

Media Appearances

Classes

  • Human Rights and Social Justice Writing Workshop, with Eric Stover (Law 262.65)
  • Open Source Investigations (J264B / L224 Spring 2024: Open Source Investigations II), with Gisela Pérez de Acha and David Barstow
  • Human Rights and War Crimes Investigations, with Eric Stover (L262.68)