James Honaker
Chief Privacy Engineer at OpenDP
Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJames Honaker is a chief privacy engineer and research leader with 13+ years building production-grade differential privacy systems for academia, industry, and government. He blends translational research and large-scale engineering, having led DP initiatives at Meta, co-founded and exited a DP startup to Mozilla, and steers use-case development at OpenDP. At Harvard he has produced widely used tools (Amelia, Zelig, TwoRavens, PSI) and secured multi-million dollar grants to operationalize privacy tech, showing a rare mix of scholarly impact and product delivery. His work targets real-world AdTech and measurement problems—bringing DP algorithms into TEEs and cloud services for Lift, targeting, and attribution. He teaches and mentors on DP implementations, bridging theory, reproducible software, and policy-facing technical review. James’s career stands out for shipping privacy-preserving systems that move from prototype to billions in business value while remaining deeply engaged in open-source and interdisciplinary research.
13 years of coding experience
22 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) at Harvard UniversityCalifornia Institute of Technology
Github Skills (38)
simulation10
meta10
opendp10
linear-models10
regression-models10
differential-privacy10
meta-analysis10
privacy-enhancing-technologies10
web-application9
r-package9
visualization9
missing-data9
data-repository9
statistics9
espn9
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
IQSS/docs.zeligproject.org
Jan 2015 - Apr 2017
Contributions:263 commits, 254 pushes, 6 comments in 2 years 3 months
IQSS/ZeligChoice
Jan 2015 - Dec 2020
ZeligChoice
Contributions:1 PR, 40 pushes, 1 branch in 6 years
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