Centre Staff

Taylor Owen (DPhil, Oxford) is the Beaverbrook Chair in Media, Ethics and Communications, The Director of The Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy, and an Associate Professor in the Max Bell School of Public Policy at McGill University. He is a Senior Fellow at the Center for International Governance Innovation, a Fellow at the Public Policy Forum, and sits on the Governing Council of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).

He was previously an Assistant Professor of Digital Media and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia and the Research Director of Tow Center for Digital Journalism at the Columbia School of Journalism. He is the author of Disruptive Power: The Crisis of the State in the Digital Age (Oxford University Press, 2015) and the co-editor of The World Won’t Wait: Why Canada Needs to Rethink its Foreign Policies (University of Toronto Press, 2015, with Roland Paris) and Journalism After Snowden: The Future of the Free Press in the Surveillance State (Columbia University Press, 2016, with Emily Bell). His forthcoming book with Emily Bell will be published by Yale University Press in 2021.

His work focuses on the intersection of media, technology and public policy and can be found at taylorowen.com and @taylor_owen.

Sonja Solomun is a Faculty Associate at the Max Bell School of Public Policy at McGill University, and the Deputy Director of the Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy, where she also leads the Climate Justice, AI and Technology Program. She is currently completing her PhD at McGill University, where she works on platform governance, climate justice and the environmental implications of AI and platforms. She has published on these and other topics in the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology, First Monday, and others.

Sonja is a 2022-2024 Fellow at the Center for Democracy & Technology in Washington, D.C and a Research Affiliate at the Data & Society Research Institute. She is also presently a Research Scholar at the Climate Social Science Network (CSSN) at Brown University, a member of the OECD Forum Network, and a founding member of the Platform Governance Research Network. In the past, she has been a research affiliate at the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), and has co-founded the Coalition for Critical Technology.

Her research and other academic activities have been featured in The Financial Times, Nature, Vice, BBC News, MIT Technology Review, Wired, Tech Crunch, OneZero, The Verge, The New York Post, The Globe & Mail, CTV News, CBC News, The Hill Times, The Logic, The National Post and elsewhere. You can follow her on Twitter at @SonjaSolomun.

Helen Hayes is a PhD Candidate at McGill University where she examines the political, environmental, and regulatory implications of Artificial Intelligence and other computational technologies in Canada’s resource economies. Helen holds an Honours Bachelor of Arts from the University of Toronto (Victoria College 1T8), and a Master’s degree in Communication Studies from McGill University (2020).

Helen’s work at the Centre focuses on platform governance, Canadian technology policy, and climate justice. Her work has been published in the Harvard Journal of Law & Technology, Interfaces: Essays on Computing & Culture, and Lecture Notes in Computer Science, amongst others. Helen is also a member of the Grierson Research Group and the Digital Governance Council’s Technical Committee, and is a co-author of the forthcoming book Electors & Elites: Online Voting in Ontario Municipalities (McGill Queens Press, ’23).

You can follow her on Twitter at @helen__hayes.