Dr. Marcelo Thompson is a Faculty member at the Centre for Law, Technology and Society, and an Assistant Professor within the Faculty of Law, Common Law Section at the University of Ottawa.
Dr. Marcelo Thompson鈥檚 teaching and research focus on the intersection between technology law and politics. Unifying his work is a concern with the meaning and institutional conditions for the promotion of justice in the information age. Specific themes he focuses on include the regulation of technological platforms, privacy, data governance, and artificial intelligence.
Dr. Thompson holds a Doctor of Philosophy from the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, a Master of Laws in Law and Technology from the University of Ottawa, and a Bachelor of Laws and Post-Graduate Diploma in Intellectual Property Law from PUC-Rio. Completed with a full scholarship from the CAPES Foundation of the Brazilian Ministry of Education, his doctoral thesis examined the idea of neutrality in technology law and politics, a theme that still informs much of his work in the field.
Prior to joining the University of Ottawa, Dr. Thompson was a full-time member of the Faculty of Law at The University of Hong Kong, where he served as Acting and Deputy Director of both the Law and Technology Centre and of the Master of Laws in Technology and Intellectual Property Law. At HKU, he was a recipient of the Faculty Research Output Prize 鈥渇or outstanding research performance鈥 and of GRF (General Research Framework) and Public Policy Research (PPR) grants, the latter awarded by the Hong Kong Chief Executive鈥檚 Policy Unit. His report under the PPR, titled 鈥淪tandards Setting, National Security and the Responsibility of Technological Platforms in Hong Kong鈥 has just been published by the Hong Kong Government. Professor Thompson remains deeply interested and involved in issues concerning the regulation of the Internet in China, with particular interest in questions of justice raised by China鈥檚 Social Credit System.
Dr. Thompson was an Alcatel-Lucent Visiting Fellow at the Hans-Bredow-Institute for Media Research at the University of Hamburg (now affiliated with the Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society) and a visiting researcher at the Institute for Information Law (IViR) at the University of Amsterdam. He has delivered invited keynote speeches and presented his work at conferences in leading institutions in more than a dozen jurisdictions. His research has been published in leading publications in the field. It has also been cited with approval, inter alia, by the Brazilian Supreme Court in leading constitutional review cases concerning software and Internet regulation in Brazil.
Dr. Thompson has been a member of the MacArthur Foundation-funded Platform Governance Research Network, a founding member of its Steering Committee, a member of AoIR鈥攖he Association of Internet Researchers, the International Society of Public Law鈥擨CON.S, and the Asia Privacy Scholars Network, and an Advisory Board Member to the European Commission-funded European Network of Excellence in Internet Science.
In a previous professional life, Dr. Thompson practiced law in Brazil, first in a technology-focused boutique law firm and later in the Government. He held positions in the legal division of the Brazilian Innovation Agency (which he entered through public examinations) and after that, at a very young age, was appointed General Counsel at the Brazilian Information Technology Institute (ITI), under the Office of the President of Brazil.