The Cornell Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy is launching the Cornell Brooks School Tech Policy Institute to provide new opportunities for students and researchers while building the Brooks School’s reputation as a national leader in the field.

Technology policy is a broad and emerging field with implications for national security, health systems, infrastructure resilience, communications, and the relationships between people and their government.

“The Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy and Cornell University are ideally positioned to guide policy makers and policy students as they seek to understand the many ways technology touches our lives,” said Brooks School Dean Colleen Barry. “We will develop a robust, interdisciplinary tech policy research agenda at Brooks while fostering deeper collaborations with units across Cornell that already do such exceptional work in this area.”

Barry announced the appointment of Professor Sarah Kreps as the Inaugural Director of the Institute. Kreps is the John L. Wetherill Professor in Government in the College of Arts and Sciences, a Professor in the Brooks School, and an Adjunct Professor of Law in the Cornell Law School.

In addition to growing the research portfolio of the Brooks School in tech policy, Kreps will collaborate with other faculty to direct Institute activities on several student-focused fronts. These include building additional curricula in tech policy, developing opportunities for student engagement in tech policy outside the classroom, and establishing a Cornell Brooks School Tech Policy Innovation Lab. The goal of the lab will be to involve students in research-to-market tech policy projects such as identifying societal market needs, incubating solutions, pitching start-ups, and ultimately bringing policy inventions to market.

A former active-duty officer in the U.S. Air Force, Kreps has written five books, including, most recently, “Social Media and International Relations.” Other books include “Taxing Wars: The American Way of War Finance and the Decline of Democracy”; “Drones: What Everyone Needs to Know”; “Drone Warfare”; and “Coalitions of Convenience: United States Military Interventions after the Cold War.”

Kreps’ work has appeared in academic journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine, Science Advances, Vaccine, Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Network Open, American Political Science Review, World Politics, International Security, and Journal of Cybersecurity, policy journals such as Foreign Affairs, and media outlets such as CNN, the BBC, New York Times, and Washington Post.