Roy L. Austin, Jr. is the Inaugural Director of the Howard Law Artificial Intelligence Initiative. He was previously Vice President of Civil Rights and Deputy General Counsel at Meta. Before joining Meta, Austin was a partner with Harris, Wiltshire & Grannis LLP and McDermott Will & Emery, where he primarily practiced criminal defense, civil, and civil rights litigation. He also has experience as an Honors Trial Attorney with the Criminal Section of the US Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, where he investigated and prosecuted hate crime and police brutality cases; Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Civil Rights Division, where he supervised the Criminal Section and the Special Litigation Section’s law enforcement portfolio; an Assistant United States Attorney in DC; and the White House Domestic Policy Council’s Deputy Assistant to the President for the Office of Urban Affairs, Justice and Opportunity, where he coauthored a report on Big Data and Civil Rights, worked with the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, helped develop the Police Data Initiative, worked on the expansion of reentry assistance, and was a member of President Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper Task Force. Austin is a graduate of Yale University and the University of Chicago Law School.