David Evan Harris

David Evan Harris is a Chancellor’s Public Scholar at UC Berkeley and a continuing lecturer at the Haas School of Business. Harris teaches courses including AI Ethics for Leaders; Social Movements & Social Media; Civic Technology; and Scenario Planning & Futures Thinking. Harris is an affiliated faculty member with the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS); 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; volunteering and non-profit organizations.

At the Institute for the Future (IFTF), he served as research director, leading research on the future of media, philanthropy, governance, international development, and social movements from 2008-2018. Harris studied at the University of São Paulo (MS, Sociology) and UC Berkeley (BA, Political Economy of Environment & Development). As a student, he was an intern at the White House Council on Environmental Quality and a confidential assistant at the Office of Management and Budget, Natural Resources Division.

Harris is formally trained in sociology and specializes in methods including ethnography, in-depth interviews, aggregation of expert opinion, survey design, scenario planning, signals scanning, multi-stakeholder workshop facilitation and content analysis.

In 2004, he founded the Global Lives Project, a network of people working to build a video library of daily life around the world. Harris continues to support the Global Lives project with help of talented teams of UC Berkeley students through the Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship Program.

Expertise and Research Interests

• Responsible Artificial Intelligence (AI)
• Social Media
• Misinformation
• Democracy
• Philanthropy
• Social movements
• Global political economy
• Poverty
• Inequality
• Development
• Brazil, Latin America.