Pratika Katiyar serves as the Student Member of the Student Press Law Center’s Board of Directors. She is an honors student on scholarship at Northeastern University, majoring in Communication Studies and Business Administration with a concentration in Finance. On campus, she is the president of Northeastern Women in Business, and she works at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School as a research assistant. She also has experience working at Amazon in privacy and program management.
Pratika is a passionate GenZ free expression activist. Over the past few years, she has lobbied extensively to get New Voices legislation passed in her home state of Virginia and across the nation. She testified for the New Voices Virginia Bill in January of 2020 and took part in the New Voices Student Leaders Institute hosted by the Student Press Law Center. She also served as a Student Press Freedom Day 2022 Co-chair, where she planned a campaign raising awareness about First Amendment protections for student journalists.
She has spoken at panels for PEN America, Georgetown Law School, and the Initiative for a Representative First Amendment at Harvard. She also made a panel appearance at the 2022 United Nations World Press Freedom Day conference to discuss censorious attacks on education. For her work, she has been profiled in several news outlets such as Teen Vogue, NBC Washington, and ABC, and has written op-eds for the Richmond Times-Dispatch and CNN.