Louise Marie Hurel

PhD Researcher, Dept. Media and Communication London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)

Research Fellow Cyber, Royal United Services Institute (RUSI)

Founder, Latin American Cybersecurity Research Network (LA/CS Net)

Louise Marie Hurel is PhD Researcher in Data, Networks, and Society at the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Her research focuses on security expertise, imaginaries, and incident response. She is interested in areas such as cybersecurity and Internet governance, platform and infrastructure studies, cyber norms, computer-mediated communication, critical security studies, risk and STS. She is also a Research Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute’s (RUSI) Cyber Team.

In 2022, Louise founded the Latin American Cybersecurity Research Network (LA/CS Net) – a platform dedicated to connecting scholars that have been conducting research on cybersecurity in the region. The LA/CS Net also seeks to contribute to the expansion of critical cybersecurity research – one that is more culturally sensitive and diverse.

For more than half a decade, Louise has structured and led Igarapé Institute’s Digital Security Programme – a Global South-focused think tank dedicated to multidimensional security issues – focusing on cyber and digital policy engagement at the national, regional, and international levels. She coordinated multiple projects that ranged from incidents against electoral processes, implementation of surveillance technologies for public security, IoT, cyber capacity building, cybercrime, and data protection.

Louise also holds an MSc in Media and Communications (Data and Society) from the LSE (distinction), where she studied the governmentality of IoT Platforms – that is, the relationship between big tech companies and technical architectures in shaping security.

Throughout the past years, she has continuously worked at the intersection between Internet governance and cybersecurity communities of practitioners. In 2017, she was selected to represent Brazil at the BRICS Youth Forum in Beijing.

In 2020, Louise was appointed as a member of the Advisory Board of the Global Forum on Cyber Expertise (GFCE) – a global platform for international cooperation on cyber capacity building. She is also part of the Advisory Group of Carnegie Endowment’s Partnership for Countering Influence Operations (PCIO) and the Centre for Information Resilience (CIR). Louise was also appointed as part of the Chamber of Security and Rights on the Internet of the Brazilian Internet Steering Committee (CGI.Br).

Her previous experience includes but is not restricted to consultancy for technical bodies, the United Nations, a UNESCO project on “What if we all governed the Internet”, and research on Internet governance, privacy, intelligence, and security at the Center for Technology and Society at Getúlio Vargas Foundation (CTS-FGV).

Throughout October 2022, Louise has been granted with a visiting fellowship at The Hague Programme on International Cybersecurity and wrote about her experience here. She is also a non-resident doctoral fellow at American University’s Internet Governance Lab and a non-resident scholar at the Jack D. Gordon Institute for Public Policy at Florida International University.