Julia Powles is the Tech Policy Lead for the campuswide initiative, UCLA DataX, the Executive Director of UCLA Institute for Technology, Law & Policy at the UCLA School of Law and UCLA Samueli School of Engineering. Professor Powles researches and teaches in the areas of privacy, intellectual property, internet governance and the law and politics of data, automation and artificial intelligence.
Prior to joining UCLA, Powles was the founding Director of the UWA Tech & Policy Lab and Associate Professor of Law and Technology at the University of Western Australia. She previously held academic appointments at Cornell Tech, New York University and the University of Cambridge, and worked at the Guardian, World Intellectual Property Organization, and MinterEllison. She is a Senior Honorary Research Fellow at the UWA Graduate School of Education and a Research Associate at the University of Cambridge Judge Business School and Faculty of Law.
Powles earned a Ph.D. in Law from the University of Cambridge and a Bachelor of Civil Law from the University of Oxford. She also holds bachelor’s degrees in Science and Law, with First Class Honors, from the Australian National University and University of Western Australia. She has received numerous honors and awards, including the Commonwealth Scholarship, Cambridge Australia Poynton Scholarship, Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition Scholarship, John Norman Barker Prize in Law, Yale Poynter Fellowship, WA 40Under40 Business Leaders Award, WYNG-Hatton Trust Fellowship and two Citations for Outstanding Contributions to Student Learning. After law school, she clerked for the Honorable Justice Garry Downes AM KC on the Federal Court of Australia and Commonwealth Administrative Appeals Tribunal.
Professor Powles leads bold, investigative research programs at the edge of tech development and tech accountability. She has a strong track-record in raising research income, leading research grants, and providing graduate research training. Her work has been published in leading journals including International Data Privacy Law, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, Health and Technology and Fordham Law Review, as well as popular publications such as The New Yorker, Guardian, Financial Times, Medium, Slate, and WIRED, among others. With Professor Frank Pasquale, she is Series Editor of Oxford Technology Law and Policy (Oxford University Press). She has served on Federal and State Advisory Committees on Generative AI in Education, AI and Copyright, Privacy and Responsible Information Sharing, Responsible AI and Robotics.
Professor Powles is committed to providing high-quality graduate research training and supervision, and welcomes approaches from master’s and doctoral candidates in law, engineering, computer science and social sciences.
