Billy Pierce

Education

• Annenberg School for Communications, University of Pennsylvania 2024 - Present
  Ph.D. Candidate, Communications Committee: Duncan J. Watts (chair), Yphtach Lelkes, Victor Pickard
• Stanford Law School 2027 - 2030
  Incoming J.D. Candidate
• University of California, Berkeley 2020 - 2024
  B.S. Business Administration (Highest Honors) B.S. Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences (High Honors) Management, Entrepreneurship, & Technology Program · GPA: 3.96 / 4.0

Teaching Experience

• Teaching Fellow, Annenberg School for Communications, University of Pennsylvania Fall 2025
  COMM 2955: The First 100 Days
  • Lectured and held office hours for class of ~30 students. Graded assignments and final papers.
  • Facilitated in-class discussions of the legal, social, and political impacts of the first 100 days of the current presidential administration. Guided complex conversations with a focus on mutual respect, academic integrity, and intellectual freedom.
• Undergraduate Student Instructor, College of Engineering, UC Berkeley Spring 2023
  EE120: Signals and Systems
  • Ran weekly discussion sections and office hours for 30+ students. Graded homework, exams, and labs.
  • Worked with fellow TAs to develop labs and homework for ~150 students.
  • Exceeded department average in 12/12 categories of student evaluation.

Talks & Publications

• Amir Tohidi, Baird Howland, Billy Pierce, Duncan Watts and David Rothschild. "Measuring "Copaganda”: An Analysis of How U.S. National News Covers Crime." International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2), July 31, 2026. Oral presentation.
• Billy Pierce. "How (de)centralized is Bluesky, really?" ATmosphereConf, March 28, 2026. Two oral presentations.

Employment

• Apple May 2023 - August 2023
  Engineering Program Management Intern
  • Expanded GDPR-compliant data portability by facilitating collaboration across legal, engineering, and privacy stakeholders. Closed on privacy-compliant expansions to existing product pipelines.
  • Redesigned issue-tracking to produce weekly leadership-level status reports for 100+ stakeholders, improving status visibility across teams in the run-up to a public release.
• Warner Bros. Discovery June 2022 - August 2022
  Technical Program Management Intern
  • Orchestrated a cross-functional collaboration to deliver A/V test assets for video playback validation on hbomax.com.
  • Aligned requirements across 12 internal and external stakeholder groups; led feature development, design meetings, content operations, legal and accessibility reviews, and more.

Volunteering & Service

• University Council, University of Pennsylvania 2025 - 2026
  Graduate Student Representative
  • Advocating and voting on behalf of graduate and professional students across the University.
• FIRST Robotics 2016 - Present
  Volunteer for FIRST Lego League, FIRST Tech Challenge, and FIRST Robotics Competition events in various roles.

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