Meet the New OTI Staff, Summer Interns, and Fellows

The OTI team is expanding! This summer we welcomed three new staff members and seven interns and fellows to our Washington, D.C. office. Our new colleagues bring with them a diverse variety of previous experiences that will aid them in continuing OTI's work on everything from open internet policy to internet security issues. Read a little bit more about each of the newest OTI team members: 

Rachel Adler is an intern working on internet security issues who just finished her junior year at Princeton University (NJ), where she studies history and technology society. She also loves art and volunteers at the campus art museum. 

Andres Bascumbe is the program manager of TechCongress. Bascumbe earned a J.D. from American University, Washington College of Law and a B.A. in mass communications and Spanish from Florida State University. Bascumbe worked on Capitol Hill in several posts under Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) on the Energy and Commerce and Oversight and Government Reform Committees, respectively. After high school, Bascumbe took the scenic route to college and lived in Panama City, Panama, London, England, and Valencia, Spain before starting classes in Florida. A true Puerto Rican, he will salsa with anyone willing to be his dance partner and puts sazón on almost anything you can eat. 

Taliesin Gabriel is from New York and is working on open internet issues at OTI this summer. She's a rising 3L at Catholic University School of Law, with a focus on communications and technology law. She's a movie buff, particularly for older movies and indie movies. She also loves to travel and tries to travel internationally as often as possible. Last summer, she visited Dubai and Thailand, and is currently planning a trip to India.

Jo Johnson is the new operations and communications associate with OTI, after interning with New America's central communications department for the past five months. Johnson is originally from Arlington, Virginia, and spent a year working in a Guayaquil, Ecuador, in a women and children's shelter after graduating from the College of Charleston with a BA in communications. After spending 4 years in the south, she continues her quest for some decent chicken and waffles in D.C. — let her know if you have any suggestions. 

Michael Lahanas, our summer communications intern, is a rising junior, political science major at Kenyon College, with a strong interest in the intersection of politics and tech. In fact, the first letter he ever wrote to a public official was to the FCC about net neutrality!

Mia Little is a rising 3L at the Washington College of Law at American University, and she's currently working in OTI as a Google Public Policy Fellow. Prior to joining OTI, Little worked for the Department of Defense as a cyber threat analyst, intelligence oversight officer, and data scientist. In her free time, she takes her dog to therapy dog certification classes so that as a team they can bring comfort to children in local hospitals.

Andrew Manley, working on open internet issues this summer, is a rising third year law student at the University of Colorado. When he's not studying, he's busy trying to get caught up on the many podcasts he subscribes to, or spending all his money on shows and vinyl. 

Amir Nasr is a program associate working on broadband policies including net neutrality, municipal broadband and broadband deployment as well as wireless policy such as increasing the availability of unlicensed spectrum. He graduated from Tufts University with a degree in history, and a concentration in European history. He has lived and studied in Annecy and Paris, and loves traveling and linguistics, international politics and foreign relations, art museums, movies, music (hip hop, tropical house, classic rock, alternative rock, pretty much everything but polka) and is a massive European football fan (Liverpool FC). 

Paul St. Clair, interning with Wireless Future, is a rising 2L at the Catholic University of America Columbus School of Law.  A graduate of Tulane University, St. Clair worked as a project coordinator for Microsoft's public policy team and interned in the office of Rep. Cedric Richmond (D-La.) prior to law school. He is looking forward to marrying his best friend Ariel, who works up the street at nonprofit Internews, next summer.

Joseph Jai-sung Yoo, Ranking Digital Rights' Annenberg Fellow, is a Ph.D candidate in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin. He studies political communication on social media, net neutrality discourses on social media, and sports communication. He can also conduct computational methods by using R and Python. He is a big fan of baseball and football and loves to ride a bicycle and run at least 5 miles.

Interested in working with OTI? Check out current job openings here, and keep an eye out for new postings in the future!