President Joe Biden has nominated Alvaro Bedoya, Founding Director of Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy & Technology and Visiting Professor, to serve on the Federal Trade Commission.

“Professor Bedoya is a leading thinker at the intersection of technology and civil rights. His research has broken new ground on the risks of face recognition technology, driving critical policy changes and bipartisan oversight,” said Georgetown Law Dean William M. Treanor. “We congratulate him. Georgetown’s loss will be consumers’ gain.”

Alvaro Bedoya

Bedoya arrived at Georgetown Law in 2014 to establish the Center, and his work there has focused on the importance of privacy for people of color, immigrants and working people. The Center’s research on face recognition led to House Oversight hearings, laws reining in the technology across the country and the first-ever comprehensive bias audit of the technology by the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Before coming to Georgetown, Bedoya served as Chief Counsel of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law. A naturalized U.S. citizen, he was born in Peru and raised in upstate New York. He graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College and holds a J.D. from Yale Law School.

At the Law Center, he directed the Federal Legislation Clinic from 2018 to 2020 with a focus on immigrant surveillance. Bedoya also pioneered a course that paired Georgetown Law students with MIT engineering students to develop policy solutions to technology issues, taught practicums on surveillance and civil rights and led a class on the law and history of the disparate impact of surveillance.