Nick Merrill

Biography

Nick Merrill, PhD, serves as a Research Mentor at ICSI. He is also Director of the Daylight Lab at the UC Berkeley Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity and a Lecturer at the UC Berkeley School of Information. 

Dr. Merrill’s work blends methods from design to data science to understand how corporate and state power tangle in technical infrastructures like the internet, and how that tangling circumscribes lives for people to live. Threat identification techniques developed by the Daylight Lab are used by the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Taiwan’s Ministry of Digital Affairs, and Meta. 

Dr. Merrill’s research is published in over two dozen peer-reviewed articles and has been covered in news outlets worldwide, including CNN, CBS, and Forbes. He also serves as an advisor to the Christchurch Call, a consortium of national governments, technology companies, and academics working to combat terrorist and violent extremist content online. He earned his PhD from the UC Berkeley School of Information and his BA in cognitive science and linguistics from Northwestern University.

Publications

Selected Leadership Activities

• Advisor, Christchurch Call

ICSI Activity