Bio

Alissa Cooper is Vice President of Ecosystem Engineering and a Fellow at Cisco Systems. She drives long-term technology projects involving technical standards, open source, research, and industry partner co-innovation for Cisco’s networking business. She serves on the FCC Technological Advisory Council (TAC), the board of the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions (ATIS), and the board of The Tor Project.

Alissa previously served as Vice President of Technology Policy and Vice President of Technology Standards at Cisco and in a variety of leadership roles in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), including serving as IETF Chair from 2017 to 2021. She also served as the chair of the IANA Stewardship Coordination Group (ICG). At Cisco she was responsible for driving privacy and policy strategy within the company’s portfolio of real-time collaboration products before being appointed as IETF Chair. Prior to joining Cisco, Alissa served as the Chief Computer Scientist at the Center for Democracy and Technology, where she was a leading public interest advocate and technologist on issues related to privacy, net neutrality, and technical standards. Alissa holds a PhD from the Oxford Internet Institute and MS and BS degrees in computer science from Stanford University.