CTIC Awards 2020 Summer Public Interest Fellowships to Rising 2Ls Gerald Adams and Joshua Burd
The University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School’s Center for Technology, Innovation & Competition (CTIC) has awarded the CTIC Summer Public Interest Fellowships to students Gerald Adams L’22 and Joshua Burd L’22.
The CTIC Summer Public Interest Fellowship provides funding for students who secure internships with public interest or government organizations that are doing work relevant to technology policy, intellectual property, cyber law, privacy, and related fields. These fellowships are open to 1Ls and 2Ls and offer students the opportunity to gain experience in technology law that might not otherwise be available to them.
Adams, who said that CTIC was a significant factor motivating his decision to attend the Law School is working for the Federal Communications Commission in the Office of Commissioner Geoffrey Starks. “Some large-scale items I have worked on,” he said, “are the recent Ligado decision,” which paves the way for a wide-scale expansion of 5G wireless networks, “and the orders establishing Huawei and Zhongxing New Telecommunications Equipment (ZTE) as national security threats to telecommunications infrastructure.”
The work he is doing, Adams said, “aligns very closely with my career aspirations. This experience and my time in Professor Christopher Yoo’s Internet Law class have confirmed my desire to work in communications law, and I can see myself returning to the FCC after graduation. I am humbled to have been selected for the Fellowship.”
Burd is working with the Smart Grid and Cyber-Physical Systems Office at the National Institute for Standards and Technology. “I’m researching and writing about how regulatory agencies could require pre-market testing for autonomous vehicles,” he said. “Through the Fellowship, I’ve been able to participate in a great professional environment, receive mentorship from senior researchers, and interact with engineers and lawyers from the autonomous vehicles industry.”
His interest in technology, Burd said, “was inspired by Barack Obama’s 2016 speech at Hiroshima. Referring to nuclear weapons, Obama said that every technological revolution requires a moral revolution. I think that the many technological changes in our lives today require moral revolutions that must be led by societal values and supported by law. My inspiration for coming to law school was to learn how to support societal change through regulation and legal advocacy, and I’m so thankful that Penn Law’s CTIC offers opportunities to help students like me put their values into action. It’s an honor to be selected for this Fellowship and I’ll be doing my best to be a good representative of Penn Law and CTIC this summer and beyond.”
The Center for Technology, Innovation and Competition is dedicated to promoting foundational research that aims to shape the way legislators, regulatory authorities, and scholars think about technology policy, intellectual property, privacy, and related fields. Through major scholarly conferences, symposia, faculty workshops, educational programs, and other activities, CTIC is committed to providing a forum for exploring the full range of scholarly perspectives on these issues. Learn more at CTIC’s website.
