Madison Snider

Media Fellow

Research Manager, Siegel Family Endowment

madison.snider@siegelendowment.org

Bio

Madison Snider, PhD is a researcher, community manager, and philanthropic strategist working to build a more just tech future centered on community power, democratic values, and collective governance. Working at the intersection of social science and practical coalition-building, her work focuses on bolstering civic knowledge infrastructures.

Currently, Madison serves as Research Manager at Siegel Family Endowment. There, she manages multi-sector fellowship programs and leads funding strategies examining how emerging technologies and AI impact workers, civic knowledge infrastructures, and public-interest governance. Prior to her work in philanthropy, she conducted participatory and ethnographic research across a variety of multi-sector challenges, ranging from IoT cybersecurity and university smart-campus infrastructures to marine plastic pollution and agricultural gene editing. Her doctoral research evidenced the need for centering worker voice in technology design, development, and deployment, demonstrating that systems built without essential workers are ultimately bound to fail.

As a Media and Community Fellow at the Public Tech Media Lab at UW-Madison, Madison is focused on safeguarding the conditions independent research and journalists need to hold powerful systems accountable. She brings her expertise in convening, program design, and interdisciplinary collaboration to PTML to explore how open-source tools, public-interest AI, and community-centered design can protect civic knowledge systems from being displaced by extractive tech models. She holds a PhD from the University of Washington, an MA from the University of Denver, and a BA from UW-Madison.