Nitya Nadgir is a recent alumnus of the Emerging Scholars program at the Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP) at Princeton University from 2023 – 2025 where she brought her interests of data privacy, surveillance, and media-driven polarization to the Center. During her time at CITP, Nitya worked with researchers to develop evaluations for agentic AI systems. She is now at The Brookings Institution working with their AI & Emerging Technology Initiative. Princeton undergraduate Jason Persaud ‘27 recently sat down with Nitya to discuss evolving research interests, her time at CITP, and what what helped guide her future career prospects in the field of technology policy.
Jason Persaud: Could you tell us a little bit more about your research and your interdisciplinary academic journey? For example, could you elaborate on your transition from International Relations to your double major in undergrad.
Nitya Nadgir: I was interested in politics and policy, but I kind of realized through taking some of my courses that tech infiltrates policy, and it impacts every aspect of our lives. And I credit my school in undergrad for giving me this experience and allowing me to learn that.
I took a course on the societal impacts of mathematical models. And then, through that, we read a lot of literature from leading scholars in STS — Science, Tech, and Society — and we watched related documentaries. And I think from that, I learned how AI and tech in general just permeates every aspect of society and exacerbates biases and issues that we already see present in society. So I think that initially sparked my interest. And then I did an internship where I focused on data privacy.
And then, the year after that, I started at CITP, where I started off doing some privacy and biometrics and digital public infrastructure work. And then I transitioned over to working on AI agents and agent evaluations. But my role was kind of to support a bunch of people at CITP in doing their research. So I’ve been really lucky to be able to work with really great professors at CITP and faculty members and help them with their research, and I learned a lot from that.
Jason: On that note, how has your fellowship at CITP shaped your approach to tech policy, and which aspects of the program have you found most rewarding?
Nitya: I think the biggest thing is that I really learned how to evaluate what I read and see online or in papers or in reports that people published critically and form my own opinions around them. I think, in tech policy and in policy in general, people have a lot of different opinions, and people write about a lot of different things.
So I think, before I started the program, I would read a lot, and I just wasn’t sure exactly what to make of the information that I was getting, especially because a lot of them had opposing viewpoints or things that I didn’t fully understand. So I think that, from doing the fellowship, I learned how to kind of look at what I read and look at what I see and apply a critical lens to it. In terms of research specifically, I’ve gotten to work with a lot of really intelligent, inspiring people, and I think that’s been really rewarding, as I mentioned earlier.
Jason: What advice would you give to undergrads that are interested in your research and/or work in the intersection of tech and policy?
Nitya: I think what really helped me was I talked to as many people as I could about the different pathways into the field. When I was in undergrad, I found it really hard to figure out how I could even break into the field in the first place.
There just aren’t that many entry-level roles, and a lot of the roles that I was seeing required master’s or PhDs. So I would say just talk to as many people as possible, because there are a lot of different ways to get into tech policy that you may not have realized before. Like, I didn’t even know programs like the CITP Emerging Scholars program existed.
And I think just talking to people and seeing how they broke into the field was really helpful for me to understand the different career pathways that exist and what would make the most sense, given my background and my interests.
Jason Persaud is a Princeton University sophomore majoring in Operations Research & Financial Engineering (ORFE), pursuing minors in Finance and Machine Learning & Statistics. He works at the Center for Information Technology Policy as a Student Associate. Jason helped launch the Meet the Researcher series at CITP in the spring of 2025.
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