Deirdre K. Mulligan is a professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information (iSchool) who works on AI governance, privacy, and sociotechnical analysis of regulatory systems. She is a faculty director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology and served as Principal Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and as Director of the National Artificial Intelligence Initiative Office, in the Biden-Harris administration.
Background and roles
Mulligan's academic work spans privacy and algorithmic-accountability scholarship over two decades. At UC Berkeley she holds an appointment at the School of Information and is a faculty director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, a co-organizer of the Algorithmic Fairness & Opacity Working Group, affiliated faculty at the Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity and a faculty advisor to its AI Policy Hub, and a faculty advisor to the CITRIS Policy Lab (Source: ischool.berkeley.edu).
In the Biden-Harris administration she served as Principal Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and as Director of the National Artificial Intelligence Initiative Office. At OSTP she led the Technology Team, whose work the office describes as applying technology and data to equitable service delivery, bringing technical and data expertise into federal policy formation and implementation, and supporting values-driven technological research and innovation (Source: ischool.berkeley.edu). The Knight First Amendment Institute records the same two roles in her contributor biography (Source: knightcolumbia.org).
Provenance note: three claims carried on this page before September 2026 are not supported by the iSchool's own faculty page and have been corrected against it: co-founder and faculty director of the Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity (the page gives affiliated faculty, and faculty advisor to its AI Policy Hub); a directorship of a "Berkeley AI Research (BAIR) Algorithmic Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency program" (the page gives co-organizer of the Algorithmic Fairness & Opacity Working Group, a Berkeley working group rather than a BAIR program); and the title "Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer" (the page and the Knight Columbia biography both give Principal Deputy). Her directorship of the National Artificial Intelligence Initiative Office and her faculty directorship of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology were absent from the page entirely. The divergence is recorded rather than removed silently.
Research and positions
Mulligan is the lead author, with Nik Marda and Victor Zhenyi Wang, of A Conceptual Model to Guide AI Risk Governance Strategies (Knight Columbia, March 16 2026) — see Sociotechnical AI Risk Governance and A Conceptual Model to Guide AI Risk Governance Strategies (Mulligan + Marda + Wang, Knight Columbia, March 16 2026). The framework names the harm/hazard distinction as a methodological primitive and the handoff lens as an analytic approach.
The framework advances critiques of several governance approaches: a technical-drift critique of International AI Safety Institute Network (INSAI / AISIN) and NIST CAISI (Center for AI Standards and Innovation); a model-centric critique of Responsible Scaling Policy (RSP), Anthropic's Responsible Scaling Policy (Version 2.2), and OpenAI Preparedness Framework V.2; and an if-then-rationality critique of Safety Cases (Frontier AI) and inability arguments.
Earlier work with Bamberger (Mulligan & Bamberger) developed the handoff lens, using coordinated CSAM-handling as the canonical example of a sociotechnical system. Mulligan and Kenneth A. Bamberger also published "Recentering Public Values in AI Governance: Examples from the Biden Administration" in volume 40 of the Berkeley Technology Law Journal at page 1335 (2026), which the iSchool lists among her representative publications (Source: ischool.berkeley.edu). The article's subject matter overlaps with the administration in which she served, and it is not held in Raw Sources/.
Relationships
- affiliated-with: Uc Berkeley (iSchool); Berkeley Center for Law & Technology (faculty director); Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity (affiliated faculty; AI Policy Hub advisor)
- prior-role: Principal Deputy U.S. CTO, White House OSTP, and Director, National Artificial Intelligence Initiative Office (Biden-Harris administration)
- co-author-with: Nik Marda, Victor Zhenyi Wang (Knight Columbia 2026 framework)
- author-of: A Conceptual Model to Guide AI Risk Governance Strategies (Mulligan + Marda + Wang, Knight Columbia, March 16 2026)
- supports: Sociotechnical AI Risk Governance, Handoffs (sociotechnical concept), Meaningful Human Review
- engages-with: International AI Safety Institute Network (INSAI / AISIN), NIST CAISI (Center for AI Standards and Innovation), Responsible Scaling Policy (RSP), Safety Cases (Frontier AI)
Sources
- A Conceptual Model to Guide AI Risk Governance Strategies (Mulligan + Marda + Wang, Knight Columbia, March 16 2026)
- Faculty page, UC Berkeley School of Information (Source: ischool.berkeley.edu)
- Contributor biography, Knight First Amendment Institute (Source: knightcolumbia.org)