Past Cyber Scholars
2024-2025 Cyber Scholars
Sibusisiwe Dlangalala (she/her) is a 2L at NYU School of Law, originally from South Africa and raised in North Carolina. She is passionate about cybersecurity, privacy law, and the evolving legal frameworks surrounding emerging technologies. Before law school, she worked at Meta, where she collaborated with law enforcement, prosecutors, and judges to resolve legal requests, an experience that sparked her interest in privacy law. She holds a degree in Peace, War, and Defense from UNC-Chapel Hill.
At NYU, Sibu is a Cyber Scholar, the Managing Editor of Operations for the Annual Survey of American Law, and a member of the Trial Advocacy Society. She is also a research assistant for Professors Samuel Issacharoff and Jason Schultz, supporting work on digital privacy, democratic governance, and civil procedure. During her 1L summer, she interned in the U.S. Department of Justice and she will spend her 2L summer at the Federal Trade Commission in the Bureau of Competition.
After graduation, Sibu hopes to pursue a public service career.
Sonali Durham is from Iowa City, Iowa. She’s interested in economic justice, consumer protection, financial regulation, and data privacy. Before law school, she worked at the civil rights law firm Relman Colfax and at The New Yorker. At NYU Law, in addition to being a Cyber Scholar, she has been a research assistant to Professor Barry Friedman, a teaching assistant to Professor Sam Issacharoff, president of Rights over Tech and of the Unemployment Action Center, a founder of NYU’s CLASS (Consumer Law Advocates, Scholars, and Students) chapter, an Articles editor for the NYU Law Review, and an Arthur Garfield Hays Civil Liberties Fellow.
Will Friend is a 4th-year JD/MBA student from Massachusetts. He is interested in IP and technology and will be starting at Debevoise & Plimpton in the fall.
Ashley Hong is a 1L and Cybersecurity Service Scholar from Los Angeles and Seoul. Prior to law school, Ashley studied computer science and international relations at Brown University. Her professional experience spans venture capital at Insight Partners, where she analyzed primarily early and growth-stage software startups, and academic research on election misinformation. At NYU, Ashley is a Research Assistant for Professor Sunoo Park, focusing on the misuse of LLMs in legal filings and European efforts to backdoor encryption. She is passionate about combating cybercrime and addressing how marginalized communities are disproportionately exposed to digital threats. Ashley will be spending her 1L summer at the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Division of Enforcement in the D.C. headquarters.
Keton Kakkar is interested in how changes in technology alter the background presumptions of substantive and procedural law. He holds a B.A. in Computer Science and English Literature, with Honors, from Swarthmore College, where he ran the student newspaper and conducted research on machine learning. At the law school, Keton has received the Butler, Pomeroy, and Furman Academic Scholar awards and had the honor of being one of three Robert A. Katzmann Fellows his 2L year. In addition to running various student organizations, he has worked as a research assistant for over seven members of the faculty — most significantly heading up the recent revision of Cases and Materials on Torts, Volume 1, under Professor Sharkey. During his summers, he worked at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Brooklyn and the firms Gibson Dunn and Susman Godfrey. In the 2026–27 term, Keton will clerk for the Honorable Richard J. Sullivan of the Second Circuit.
Sean Kesluk is a 2L at NYU Law School interested in the intersection of private cybersecurity innovation and public security policy – particularly the increasing importance of technology firms in protecting critical infrastructure from emerging threats and advancing national security interests. Before law school, Sean was a private equity analyst and an officer in the United States Navy. He spent his 1L summer in Singapore with the frontier markets team at Cerberus Capital Management, and will spend his 2L summer at Cooley LLP in New York.
Micah Musser is a current 2L. Originally from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, he attended college at Georgetown University and spent three and a half years working in AI and cybersecurity policy at the Center for Security and Emerging Technology in Washington, DC. In addition to being a Cyber Scholar, Micah is an Articles Editor on the N.Y.U. Law Review, a Furman Academic Scholar, a Vanderbilt Scholar, and the Treasurer for the student club Rights Over Tech. He was a member of the Technology Law and Policy Clinic in Fall 2024, where he co-wrote an amicus brief in a defamation case against OpenAI, and he will be spending his 2L summer at Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton in New York City. His primary interests are in civil litigation, private law, and national security law, with an emphasis on how each body of law responds to changes in technology.
Gwendolyn Strasberg Gardner is a part of the Class of 2025 at New York University School of Law. She holds a Master of Public Diplomacy from USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and bachelor’s degrees in political science and Spanish from the USC Dornsife School of Arts and Sciences. Gwendolyn is also an officer in the United States Marine Corps, working in matters of national security related to cyberspace.
2022-2023 Cyber Scholars
Kevin Kuate Fodouop Originally from Paris, France, Kevin studied math, computer science and statistics at Ecole Polytechnique and Harvard University before spending 6 years in the technology industry. Kevin focused his tech career on social impact ventures, most recently leading product and growth teams in health tech and education tech. Prior to law school, Kevin was the Head of Growth at Mos.com, an education-tech startup that helps alleviate the student debt crisis by making college funding more accessible to students across the United States.
At NYU, Kevin has specialized in technology policy and regulation and has written and published on challenges raised by artificial intelligence in antitrust, intellectual property, and tort law. Kevin spent his 1L summer with the Antitrust Bureau of the New York State Attorney General’s Office and his 2L summer at Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP. At NYU, Kevin is an Executive Editor of the NYU Law Review and has served as the President of student groups Rights over Tech and the Asia Law Society. After graduation, Kevin will join the Antitrust Group of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz.
William Friend is a 2L at NYU Law School interested in the future of cyber conflict and cooperation at the national and international levels. At NYU Law he is a staff editor for the NYU Journal of International Law and Politics and a Jacobson Law & Business Leadership Scholar. This past summer, he was an SEC Scholar in the US Securities & Exchange Commission’s Division of Enforcement in the New York Regional Office. Prior to law school, Will worked as Global Director of Government Relations for a fintech startup.
Apurva Panse (she/her) is a 2L from Southern California. She is interested in the intersection of race, technology, and law, with a focus on technologies most harmful to marginalized communities. Before law school, she was a Product Manager at YouTube working on combatting misinformation and extremist content and graduated from UCLA with a degree in Computer Science. In addition to being a Cyber Scholar, she is a fellow with the Center on Race, Inequality and the Law, a research assistant for Professor Vincent Southerland, co-chair of SALSA (South Asian Law Students Association), co-president of Rights over Tech, a student advocate for the Suspension Representation Project, an instructor with the High School Law Institute and a Notes editor on the Law Review. She spent her 1L summer interning with the Legal Aid Society’s Criminal Defense Practice in their DNA Unit. After graduation, Apurva hopes to work on abolishing carceral surveillance and the technologies that amplify police power as an attorney and professor.
2021-2022 Cyber Scholars
Jacob Apkon received his B.S. in Computer Science from Tufts University. After graduation, he worked at a tech startup as a software engineer building automation systems for Fortune 500 companies. He is now a 2L interested in speech and privacy, as well as automation policy. He spent his 1L summer working in public policy at the Washington, D.C. office of the Brennan Center for Justice.
Joanne Dynak is a 2L interested in data security and privacy regulation. At NYU Law, she is a staff editor for the Journal of Intellectual Property and Entertainment Law, a member of the Innovation Externship program, and serves on the board of the Intellectual Property and Entertainment Law Society and the Midwestern Law Society. During her 1L year, Joanne was a member of the Privacy Research Group and continues to assist one of her professors in research on the role of “information fiduciaries” in corporate structures. This past summer, she was a summer associate at Davis Polk & Wardwell and a legal intern at Google NYC. She graduated from Harvard University in 2016 with a degree in Government, with a focus on data policy.
Mo Satt is the Chief Information Security Officer of the Fire Department, City of New York (FDNY), where he is responsible for the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the information and public safety systems of the nation’s largest fire department. Since 1999, he has dedicated his career as a civil servant to enhancing the quality of life and public safety for all New Yorkers. From 2005 to 2015, he served as a civilian member of the New York City Police Department, where he was instrumental in delivering a real-time, secure 9-1-1 mobile response platform to police officers, that has proven itself in many life-saving situations. In addition, he was responsible for building and maintaining a secure wide area network for the NYPD. From 2015 to 2018, Mo served as the Manager of Public Safety Cybersecurity Operations and Engineering at the New York City Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT), where he was responsible for defending New York City’s 9-1-1 call taking and dispatch centers, known as Public Safety Answering Centers, from cyber attacks. Mo received the Academic Achievement Award from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at NYU Tandon for achieving an overall CGPA of 3.9 after completing two full-time semesters of graduate study in cybersecurity. He also received a Certificate of Distinction for completion with distinction of the Bridge to Tandon program. He is a graduate of the FBI Citizens Academy and holds CISSP and CISM certifications.
Earlier Cyber Scholars
Sam Bieler is a 2019 graduate of NYU Law interested in cybercrime and cybersecurity law. Prior to law school, he worked as a criminologist with the Urban Institute’s Justice Policy Center, where his work was featured in The New York Times, The Economist, and Vice. At NYU, he is a fellow at the Center on the Administration of Criminal Law, supporting justice reform in New York City. He interned with the Criminal Division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York during his first summer at law school, and was a summer associate with the White-Collar Crime group of Skadden Arps during his second. He graduated magna cum laude with a B.A. in Criminology and Diplomatic History, and an M.S. in Criminology both from the University of Pennsylvania.
Brooke Gottlieb is a 2019 graduate of NYU Law who previously served as the Vice President and Treasurer of the National Security Reading Group. In the spring of 2018, Brooke participated in the Southern District of New York’s Prosecution Clinic, where she reported to Assistant U.S. Attorneys in both the Complex Frauds and Cybercrime division, and the Terrorism and International Narcotics division. Her article about Carpenter v. United States and government access to historical cell site location information was published in NYU’s Journal of Legislation and Public Policy’s online companion, Quorum in April of 2018. This past summer she was a Summer Associate at Proskauer Rose.
Paula Kift was a doc
toral student in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University (NYU) as well as a Student Fellow at NYU’s Information Law Institute. She is interested in global privacy governance, transborder data flows, and the relationship between privacy and security. Paula earned a BA summa cum laude from Princeton University in 2012, where she studied French Literature and Political Science as a major, and Near Eastern Studies and European Cultural Studies as minors. During her undergraduate studies, she completed exchange semesters at the universities of Barcelona and Paris. In 2014 Paula received a master’s degree in public policy from the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin. Previously she worked as a research assistant at the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society (HIIG) and at the Global Public Policy Institute (GPPi) in Berlin. She is a member of the GPPi Circle of Friends and an Associate Member of the American Council on Germany (ACG).
Yin Mei received her B.A. in Psychology at UC Berkeley. In 2010, she moved to Beijing to work at a public relations consulting firm. She also lead tech and innovation community events, including TEDxBeijing and BarCamp Beijing. In 2013, she moved to New York City and became active with the journalism community. She is currently serving her second term as membership chair for the Asian American Journalists Association. After seeing a gap in tech talent in New York, she enrolled in a three-month bootcamp in 2014 to kickstart her career as a software engineer. Today, she’s working full-time for a medical startup, devoting her days to improving quality of outcomes for cancer patients. Yin graduated from the intensive NYU CS Bridge program in 2016 and began work on a Masters in Cyber Security. Given her background in communications and journalism, she worked on a project exploring ways to bridge the knowledge gap of technology solutions to secure the integrity of material for investigative journalists. Find her on Twitter @msyinmei.
Emily Poole, a 2018 graduate of NYU Law, is interested in cybersecurity law, its implications for our national security, and the role of our democratic institutions in overseeing developments in both of these areas. She is the founder of the National Security Reading Group, a new student organization sponsored by the Center on Law and Security, which hosts monthly lunch discussions with experts in different areas of national security law. She was also on the board of the NYU Law and Government Society. In Summer 2016, she was a judicial intern at the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, and also conducted research on privacy law for an upcoming book by a NYU professor. In Summer 2017, she worked on cybersecurity issues as a summer associate at Alston & Bird LLP in Washington, D.C. She graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Tufts University with a B.A. in International Relations and French.
Alex Siegel received his B.A. in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics from the University of Pennsylvania in 2013. After graduation he returned home to the California Bay Area to work for Google, where he assisted the legal team with product counseling and commercial matters. While studying at NYU Law, Alex consulted for startup companies as a Fellow for InSITE, a graduate student leadership development program. He also worked as a Staff Editor for the NYU Journal of Law and Business, and served on the board of the West Coast Connection student group. Alex spent the summer of 2016 interning with Yelp’s legal department, and his 2017 summer as a summer associate with Morrison & Foerster’s Technology Transactions group in San Francisco. Alex graduated from NYU Law in 2018 and returned to Morrison & Foerster that Fall.
Laura Sorice is a 2019 graduate of NYU Law interested in cyber-crime, corporate compliance, and the preservation of civil liberties in information privacy. She graduated from the University of Pennsylvania magna cum laude in 2016 with a B.A. in Political Science. During her first year of law school, Laura worked as a research assistant exploring constitutional challenges to the seizure of telephony metadata, confirming her interest in cybersecurity. She also served as the Co-President of NYU Law Women, as a board member for First Generation Professionals, and as the Senior Articles Editor for the NYU Law Journal of Legislation and Public Policy. Laura spent the summer of 2017 as a legal intern for the Civil Division of the United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York, and the summer of 2018 as a summer associate at Sidley Austin LLP in New York City.
Please note: Biographies were posted at the time of each student’s scholarship.