Our Leadership Through Mentorship Program hosts influential policy leaders, practitioners, and advocates for visits at the School. They attend classes, have meals with students, and conduct office hours. Occasionally, these guests give lectures open to the public.

Dr. Carla Hayden was sworn in as the 14th Librarian of Congress on September 14, 2016. Hayden, the first woman and the first African American to lead the national library, was nominated to the position by President Barack Obama on February 24, 2016, and her nomination was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on July 13.

Prior to her latest post she served, since 1993, as CEO of the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, Maryland. Hayden was nominated by President Obama to be a member of the National Museum and Library Services Board in January 2010 and was confirmed to that post by the Senate in June 2010. Prior to joining the Pratt Library, Hayden was deputy commissioner and chief librarian of the Chicago Public Library from 1991 to 1993. She was an assistant professor for Library and Information Science at the University of Pittsburgh from 1987 to 1991. Hayden was library services coordinator for the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago from 1982 to 1987. She began her career with the Chicago Public Library as the young adult services coordinator from 1979 to 1982 and as a library associate and children’s librarian from 1973 to 1979.

Hayden was president of the American Library Association from 2003 to 2004. In 1995, she was the first African American to receive Library Journal’s Librarian of the Year Award in recognition of her outreach services at the Pratt Library, which included an after-school center for Baltimore teens offering homework assistance and college and career counseling. Hayden received a B.A. from Roosevelt University and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the Graduate Library School of the University of Chicago.

Dr. Hayden will be joined in conversation with Prateek Mittal and Tithi Chattopadhyay.

Prateek Mittal is the interim director of CITP from July 1, 2022 to June 30, 2023, and he is also on CITP’s executive committee. He is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Princeton University, where he is also affiliated with computer science. He is interested in the design and development of privacy-preserving and secure systems. His current interests include the domains of (1) privacy-enhancing technologies such as anonymous communication and statistical data privacy, (2) adversarial machine learning, and (3) Internet/network security.

A unifying theme in Mittal’s work is to manipulate and exploit structural properties of data and networked systems to solve privacy and security challenges facing our society. His research has applied this distinct approach to widely-used operational systems, and has used the resulting insights to influence system design and operation, including that of the Tor network and the Let’s Encrypt certificate authority, directly impacting hundreds of millions of users.

He is the recipient of Princeton University’s E. Lawrence Keyes, Jr. award for outstanding research and teaching, the NSF Career award, the ONR YIP award, the ARO YIP award, faculty research awards from IBM, Intel, Google, Cisco, and multiple award publications.

Tithi Chattopadhyay, executive director, CITP. Tithi oversees strategic planning, operations and staffing, research collaborations, fundraising and development, and new initiatives — such as CITP’s Emerging Scholars and Public Interest Technology Summer Fellowship programs. Chattopadhyay, an economist and expert on issues around broadband, also teaches and conducts research on the digital divide, the impact of the digital economy, and the evolving role of public institutions, including universities, in addressing societal goals around technology. Chattopadhyay is the former broadband director for the State of Wisconsin. She also worked as a consultant and policy advisor for several local, state and higher education institutions on technology and economic development projects. She holds a Ph.D. in information studies and has bachelor’s and master’s degrees in economics and mathematics.