Collegium Helveticum
Switzerland
fellow
Wendy K. Tam
2026-2027
Home institution
Vanderbilt University, US
Country of origin (home institution)
United States
Discipline(s)
Political Sciences; Science and technology studies
Theme(s)
Artificial Intelligence; Contemporary violence & Justice; Human Rights
Fellowship dates
›
Biography
Wendy K. Tam is Professor and Stevenson Chair of Political Science, Computer Science, Law, and Biomedical Informatics at Vanderbilt University, an affiliate at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and Professor Emerita at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Professional Researcher in the School of Medicine at the University of California at San Francisco. She has been a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Society for Political Methodology, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (Stanford), a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution (Stanford), and an IEEE Senior Member.
Research Project
From Platforms to Models: Internet Governance in the Age of Generative Intermediaries
As large language models increasingly replace search engines as our primary gateway to knowledge, this project asks: can legal systems built to regulate human-authored content still govern systems that generate it?
Wendy K. Tam’s current research examines the legal foundations of internet governance, emphasizing how distinct legal epistemologies in the United States and European Union shape intermediary liability, speech, and data protection, and how law and computation jointly produce social outcomes. The project extends this inquiry to the generative realm, as large language models displace search engines and platforms as the primary interface between citizens and knowledge. This shift unsettles regulatory frameworks designed for intermediaries that retrieve human-authored content rather than systems that generate it.
Wendy uses mechanistic interpretability of open-weight models to demonstrate that political framing is encoded as a locatable and steerable geometric direction within the model, and that alignment training masks rather than removes this structure. These tools render a generative intermediarys internal choices legible, precisely where legal measurement premised on identifiable sources breaks down. The aim is a globally grounded account of how legal systems and model architectures will jointly govern the emerging information environment.
Research Interests:
legal systems; human-authored content; legal foundations