CIGI’s Digital Policy Hub Welcomes 20 New Fellows for 2026–2027

'Damola Adediji is a Digital Policy Hub doctoral fellow and a researcher at the Centre for Law, Technology and Society at the University of Ottawa. His research highlights gaps in international copyright law, particularly regarding the use of Africa’s rich linguistic diversity to broaden access to textual and digital educational materials in Indigenous African languages, with a focus on Nigeria and South Africa. He also explores how reimagining competition law alongside copyright law could address these challenges. During his Digital Policy Hub fellowship, his work shifts to safeguarding Canadian digital sovereignty through competition law amid global trade uncertainties. His project at CIGI investigates how major reforms to Canadian competition law, especially sections 71 and 90 of the Competition Act, can curb data-driven market concentration, thereby strengthening Canada’s digital sovereignty while adhering to existing trade commitments.

Ephraim Ajijola is a Digital Policy Hub doctoral fellow and a Ph.D. candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School, York University. His doctoral research explores the intersection of big bank resolution, fintech regulation and systemic risk to safeguard financial stability. As part of his Digital Policy Hub fellowship, Ephraim investigates regulatory fragmentation in Canadian non-bank payments. Specifically, his work comparatively evaluates how the regulation and governance of payment service providers shapes, or disrupts, technology sovereignty, tech-as-a-service dynamics, fintech business models and the evolution of the broader Canadian payments landscape.

Lauren Avis is a Digital Policy Hub master’s fellow studying political science and international development at McGill University. She graduated from the UCL School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies with first-class honours (with distinction) in history, politics and economics. Her research interests concern the post-Soviet space and critical disinformation studies. During her Digital Policy Hub fellowship, she will be examining mechanisms and policy frameworks to address information manipulation while assessing polarization impact and narrative resonance.

Natalie Chu is a Digital Policy Hub doctoral fellow. She is also a Ph.D. student in Criminology at Simon Fraser University and a research assistant at the International CyberCrime Research Institute (ICCRI) supervised by Dr. Richard Frank. Natalie obtained her B.Com. with a specialization in Accounting and M.Sc.B in Management Information Systems from the University of British Columbia. Her Ph.D. research is centered around developing, measuring, and evaluating artificial intelligence and machine learning systems that enhance a user’s ability to detect and prevent financial fraud victimization. During her Digital Policy Hub doctoral fellowship with CIGI, she will be exploring effective and fair uses of artificial intelligence within financial systems while evaluating criminal exploitation and abuse of artificial intelligence that results in financial fraud and cybercrime.

Ashiya Dewan is a Digital Policy Hub undergraduate fellow pursuing a double major through the Peace, Conflict and Justice and the Ethics, Society and Law Programs at the University of Toronto. Her research explores the risks and benefits that artificial intelligence (AI) poses for socio-economically disadvantaged K–12 schoolchildren, aiming to advance ethical and effective implementation that supports student learning rather than undermining it.

Her broader research interests encompass the societal and civilian dimensions of technological governance, spanning from big tech accountability to digital violations and the deployment of weaponized technologies in conflict zones. As a Laidlaw Leadership and Research Scholar, she is conducting fieldwork with an education charity and rural schools in North East England to support her research.

Morgan Flom is a Digital Policy Hub master’s fellow, pursuing an M.A. in philosophy at the University of Guelph, where he studies the impacts of artificial intelligence in military and national security arenas. He leverages his experience as a US intelligence officer, targeteer and technologist to provide a grounded perspective on the ethical and epistemic effects of data-driven operations. His aim with his current studies has been to acquire the philosophical and analytical tools to properly understand and communicate the issues that arose in his previous career. Within months of his starting, this approach began to gain traction, as he has been asked to present multiple times across North America and Europe. Morgan’s research with the Digital Policy Hub represents another public-facing marriage of his body of work in that it explores the faults and dangers of these critical workflows from a more policy-focused perspective and aims to offer rigorous and actionable risk-reduction recommendations to relevant decision makers.

Gagneet Kaur is a Digital Policy Hub master’s fellow who is studying criminology at the University of Windsor, focusing on security policy and foreign interference issues. During her Digital Policy Hub fellowship, she will examine whether Canada’s Policy on Sensitive Technology Research and Affiliations of Concern (STRAC), designed to protect research from foreign interference, achieves its stated principles after its first year. Drawing on her experience in implementation as a research administration professional, she is evaluating STRAC’s effectiveness, proportionality and fairness, comparing Canada’s approach with those of the United Kingdom and Australia, while learning from the failure of the United States’ China Initiative. Gagneet’s work examines how democratic states balance national security imperatives with academic freedom, civil liberties and non-discrimination principles.

Kirthana Singh Khurana is a Digital Policy Hub doctoral fellow pursuing her Ph.D. at the Peter A. Allard School of Law, University of British Columbia. During her Digital Policy Hub fellowship, she will examine how corporate governance and securities regulation should evolve to address accountability gaps created by corporations’ growing reliance on artificial intelligence (AI) and concentrated digital infrastructure, with a focus on disclosure obligations, board oversight and AI-induced climate emissions. Her broader research assesses the adequacy of existing corporate governance and fiduciary frameworks in an era of technological disruption and climate transition. She holds an LL.M. from Yale Law School, a master’s degree in corporate law from the University of Cambridge, and an LL.B. and a B.Com. (Hons.) from the University of Delhi, India. Prior to her doctoral studies, she served as an assistant professor and assistant dean of academic affairs at Jindal Global Law School, India.

Kem-Laurin Lubin is a CIGI Digital Policy Hub post-doctoral fellow and a critical artificial intelligence (AI) scholar and computational rhetorician affiliated with the University of Waterloo, where she completed her Ph.D. Her research examines how AI systems characterize human beings within an emerging mode of digital citizenship management, asking who encodes algorithmic power, who is harmed by it and whose knowledge systems are erased in its design. Her current research focuses on AI value infrastructure, examining Global South innovations for reimagining Canada’s AI surveillance infrastructure.

Kem-Laurin is the author of Design Heuristics for Emerging Technologies: AI, Data, and Human-Centered Futures (2025), and her scholarship has appeared in Rhetoric Society Quarterly and in the proceedings of the International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (Springer). She is co-chair of the AI Global South Summit and outreach officer for the Association for the Rhetoric of Science, Technology, and Medicine. Kem-Laurin contributes to public policy discussions on AI governance, data privacy and surveillance across Canada and the Global South.

Mostafa Majidi is a Digital Policy Hub doctoral fellow and a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the University of Calgary. His research examines digital authoritarianism, protest movements and the political consequences of digital technologies. His dissertation explores how social movements adapt to surveillance, censorship and repression under authoritarian conditions, focusing on the evolving relationship between states, digital platforms and activist networks. Using a mixed-methods approach that combines computational analysis with qualitative research, he studies how digital governance, online repression and platform regulation shape contemporary political mobilization. During his Digital Policy Hub fellowship, he will examine governance challenges related to platform regulation, digital repression and democratic resilience, with the goal of contributing policy-relevant research on the societal implications of emerging digital technologies.

Alina Mambo is a Digital Policy Hub master’s fellow studying global affairs at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. During her Digital Policy Hub fellowship, she will be examining how states across regime types use legal, technical and regulatory tools to assert control over digital infrastructure.

Aiden McIlvaney is a Digital Policy Hub master’s fellow, and has also been awarded master’s research scholarships from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the Fonds de recherche du Québec. Aiden is pursuing an M.A. in political science at McGill University. His research examines electoral governance, foreign influence operations and cyberthreats to democratic processes, with a focus on Canadian public opinion and comparative policy. During his Digital Policy Hub fellowship, he will be examining the regulation of artificial intelligence in Canadian elections and how public attitudes toward such uses can inform meaningful policy outcomes.

Bruna Shinohara de Mendonça is a Digital Policy Hub visiting fellow and a staff scientist in quantum technologies at CMC Microsystems, Canada. Bruna holds a Ph.D. in physics from the University of São Paulo, Brazil. During her Digital Policy Hub fellowship, she will be examining policy mechanisms to bridge the quantum divide between the Global North and the Global South.

Panagiotis Michalopoulos is a Digital Policy Hub doctoral fellow studying computer engineering at the University of Toronto. His current research interests include privacy-preserving and regulation-compliant offline central bank digital currencies and the secure hardware technologies to implement them. During his Digital Policy Hub fellowship, he will be examining digital asset tokenization with an emphasis on equities and bonds.

Linxi Mytkolli is a Digital Policy Hub visiting fellow and director of patient engagement at Diabetes Action Canada. Her work focuses on health governance, patient engagement, and building more accountable systems for research, care and policy. During her Digital Policy Hub fellowship, she will examine how patients and the public can have a stronger role in decisions about how artificial intelligence (AI) is purchased, governed and used in Canadian health care. Drawing on lived experience with type 1 diabetes and professional experience leading national patient engagement programs, Linxi’s research explores whose expertise shapes health-care AI, how institutions define risk, and what governance mechanisms could make AI adoption more transparent, participatory and publicly accountable.

Eliz Shimshek is a Digital Policy Hub doctoral fellow studying cognitive psychology and neuroscience, specializing in visual perception, at the University of Toronto. During her Digital Policy Hub fellowship, she will be examining the governance implications of eye-tracking data, specifically, how machine learning transforms gaze patterns into sensitive inferences about identity, emotion, cognitive capacity and health, and why Canadian privacy frameworks are not equipped to regulate what that data can reveal.

Patrick Spencer is a Digital Policy Hub doctoral fellow and a Ph.D. candidate in public policy at Carleton University’s School of Public Policy and Administration. His research examines digital government, artificial intelligence (AI) governance and the institutional conditions shaping public sector delivery capability. As a Digital Policy Hub fellow, he is developing a policy-facing diagnostic framework to assess how governance, sourcing, architecture and workforce arrangements drive delivery risk in major digital and AI initiatives. The framework helps governments identify risk conditions before contractual, architectural and organizational lock-in takes hold. Patrick brings more than 20 years of experience in technology-enabled government, consulting, audit and systems integration. He has advised public, private and non-profit organizations on AI governance, digital transformation and institutional capability.

Jillian Stringer is a Digital Policy Hub post-doctoral fellow. Jillian is a post-doctoral public health researcher at the University of Guelph, where she completed her master’s of public health and her Ph.D. in population medicine. Her Digital Policy Hub fellowship examines participatory governance for artificial intelligence social media algorithms and their implications for youth mental health. Jillian takes an interdisciplinary, upstream approach to research, emphasizing knowledge equity and meaningful youth engagement. She brings policy experience from national and international leadership roles in the youth mental health sector.

Daria Synelnykova is a Digital Policy Hub undergraduate fellow studying international relations and peace, conflict and justice at the University of Toronto. Her research explores how Canada can retain intellectual property and scale digital technology firms domestically to strengthen the country’s economic and digital sovereignty.

Alexandra Volokhova is a Digital Policy Hub doctoral fellow. She is pursuing her Ph.D. studies in artificial intelligence (AI) at Université de Montréal and Mila — Québec AI Institute. During her Digital Policy Hub fellowship, she will be examining frameworks for cooperative ownership and democratic governance of AI and related digital technologies.