Nik Marda is an AI governance and technology-policy specialist whose work centers on open-source AI, public AI infrastructure, and risk governance in the public interest.
Background and roles
Marda served as Technical Lead for AI Governance at Mozilla through 2025, where his work focused on how open-source AI and public infrastructure can broaden who is able to build and use AI in the public interest. Earlier he worked at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) as chief of staff of its Technology Division, planning and overseeing federal policy initiatives on AI, privacy, and digital assets, and as a policy advisor in the National AI Initiative Office, working on guardrails for AI use, particularly to protect civil and human rights. Before government he consulted on technology policy for Data & Society, assisted with AI ethics work for the National Security Commission on AI, and supported the Biden-Harris transition (Source: https://just-tech.ssrc.org/our-network/nik-marda/).
The Knight Columbia essay described below lists Marda with a UC Berkeley affiliation alongside co-author Deirdre Mulligan (UC Berkeley iSchool); his most extensively documented role is Technical Lead for AI Governance at Mozilla, which he held through 2025. Both affiliations are recorded here rather than over-specifying the affiliation he held at the publication date.
Risk-governance work
Marda is a co-author, with Deirdre K. Mulligan and Victor Zhenyi Wang, of A Conceptual Model to Guide AI Risk Governance Strategies (Knight Columbia, March 16 2026), summarized at A Conceptual Model to Guide AI Risk Governance Strategies (Mulligan + Marda + Wang, Knight Columbia, March 16 2026) and discussed at Sociotechnical AI Risk Governance.
The essay argues that current AI risk governance defaults to component-by-component, model-centric, technocratic mitigation, and proposes instead a sociotechnical-systems orientation that assesses risk across data, models, applications, organizational processes, and policies, and prefers harm-reducing interventions over hazard-reducing ones. Among its institutional-design recommendations is disentangling ownership of AI systems from participation in their risk management, so that entities with relevant expertise, operational capacity, and independence can take part. Marda's policy background spans federal AI-initiative design, civil-rights guardrails, and AI-governance work grounded in openness and public infrastructure.
Relationships
- co-author-with: Deirdre K. Mulligan
- author-of: A Conceptual Model to Guide AI Risk Governance Strategies (Mulligan + Marda + Wang, Knight Columbia, March 16 2026)
- supports: Sociotechnical AI Risk Governance
- related: Open-Source AI / Open-Weight Models
- prior-role: White House OSTP (Technology Division chief of staff); National AI Initiative Office; Mozilla
Sources
- A Conceptual Model to Guide AI Risk Governance Strategies (Mulligan + Marda + Wang, Knight Columbia, March 16 2026) — Mulligan, Marda & Wang, A Conceptual Model to Guide AI Risk Governance Strategies, Knight Columbia, March 2026.
- (Source: https://just-tech.ssrc.org/our-network/nik-marda/) — SSRC Just Tech network profile (biography, roles, prior positions).