Glencora Borradaile believes that communication should be private and secure by default and worries about corporate and state threats to first-amendment protected activities. They are on the advisory board of the Civil Liberties Defense Center where they helped initiate and continue to build a Digital Security program to support activists and their lawyers.

They have initiated a research program whose mission is to support the digital needs of activists, and ensure that everyone can communicate freely and safely, regardless of their identity. They also created and teach an interdisciplinary course on communications security and social movements that is offered through the Difference, Power and Discrimination program of Oregon State University’s Baccalaureate Core.

In the past, Glencora’s research focused on traditional network flow and design problems in planar graphs and other sparse graphs. Their work in this area was recognized with an NSF CAREER award. They are an associate editor of the ACM Transactions on Algorithms.

They still do this work some of the time. Glencora has a B.Sc. in Applied Mathematics from the University of Western Ontario (2002) and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Brown University (2008) and held a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of Combinatorics and Optimization at the University of Waterloo.