Stephen Damianos is a scholar and practitioner working at the intersection of public policy, human rights, and technology governance. He is Executive Director of the Neurorights Foundation, where he leads global efforts to harness neurotechnologies for social good and protect against their misuse. He works in close collaboration with governments, multilateral institutions, industry leaders, and policymakers around the world, guiding research, policy development, and advocacy.
His work has been featured on the front page of The New York Times and led to briefings at the White House, the National Security Council, and the U.S. State Department. He has contributed to the passage of the first laws in American history to protect individuals' brain data from commercial misuse, and informed the nation's first federal neurotechnology legislation.
Damianos is a Lecturer in Ethics and Public Policy at Cornell University and a Research Affiliate at Columbia University's NeuroTechnology Center. In addition to his work in the emerging technology space, he conducts research on borders, migration, and digitalization. He is the author of Asylum Is Unavailable: Absence and Absurdity at the Digital Border (University of California Press, September 2026) and co-editor of the forthcoming Cambridge Handbook of Neurotechnology Governance: Legal and Ethical Frontiers (Cambridge University Press).
Damianos holds a PhD (DPhil) in International Development from the University of Oxford, an MPhil in Development Studies from the University of Cambridge, and a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania. He is a Truman Scholar and a Rhodes Scholar.
Fellowship Project: For the first time in history, neurotechnologies are expanding beyond clinical settings into consumer and military applications, enabling access to the most intimate data humans generate: neural signals reflecting mental states, emotions, and cognition. Simultaneously, digital surveillance in immigration enforcement is escalating and remains unchecked. These are generally treated as separate policy domains. This project brings them together, identifying neural data extraction as an emerging frontier of surveillance capitalism and border violence. It analyzes the legal mechanisms enabling government access to commercial neural data, tracing how technologies tested on bordered people scale to broader populations whose thoughts and political beliefs are treated as threats and examining how the commodification of neural data places new strain on democratic commitments to freedom of thought and political agency.