Kent Wada

Kent Wada is chief privacy officer and director, Policy and Privacy for the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) campus.

Designated as the campus’s first chief privacy officer, Kent addresses foundational privacy and data issues that have broad impact on the campus community, the academy, and the University mission. His office collaborates closely with other campus offices, including those with compliance authority for the protection of personal information and counterparts in the Health Sciences, to have UCLA be a good steward of data. In his role as director, policy and privacy in the Office of Advanced Research Computing, Kent works broadly with the campus and its data and IT governance functions to help shape the institutional agenda for technology policy issues of strategic concern.

Kent sits on the Cyber-Risk and Data Privacy Governance Committee, UCLA Web Accessibility Initiative Steering Committee, and Health Sciences Data Strategy and Governance Committee; and as an ex officio member of the Common Systems Group, Academic Senate’s Committee on Data, Information Technology and Privacy, and Health Sciences’ Enterprise Compliance Oversight Board. He is a member the Campus Incident Response Team and the UC Privacy Officers group. Kent has also served on numerous University and national committees and task forces. For EDUCAUSE, he co-chairs the Higher Education Chief Privacy Officers Community Group and is a member of the Community Group Leaders, Core Data Service Privacy Working Group, Higher Education Information Security Council's Advisory Committee, and the Policy Advisory Committee. He is also a member of the Future of Privacy Forum's Student Data Privacy Working Group.

Kent is passionate about enabling individuals to participate fully as digital citizens, particularly around the application of emergent technologies to people’s lives in a manner respectful of civil liberties in the digital realm. He often speaks on current policy and privacy topics, at the intersection of balancing opportunity and risk in a world awash in need for data.