Philip Doty

Philip Doty is Associate Professor Emeritus at the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin. He retired in September 2022, having served on the faculty for 30 years, including 9 as Associate Dean and 7 as Graduate Advisor. He was also a founding faculty member of the Technology and Information Policy Institute, serving as an Associate Director from 1997-2021, and a Faculty Affiliate of the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies at UT. He has also been a visiting faculty member at the iSchools at Syracuse University, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

His research, teaching, and consulting have focused on information policy, particularly the nexus of surveillance, privacy, copyright, and digital information technologies. Additional areas of expertise are surveillance and security affairs, the empirical study of information behavior and practices, policy analysis as a research technique, gender and IT, computer networks, philosophy, and research methods.

Doty has consulted with some 30 external clients: U.S. federal agencies; state agencies in New York, Texas, and Virginia; public and private universities; and legislative and executive branch agencies in the U.S. and elsewhere, e.g., Mexico, Colombia, France, and Japan.

He has directly supervised 63 graduate student’s research as: dissertation advisor for 10 iSchool PhD students; a member of the dissertation committees of 19 other UT PhD students at the iSchool, the departments of Radio-TV-Film and Journalism in the Moody College of Communication, and the department of English in the College of Liberal Arts; advisor of eight iSchool MS theses and four MS reports; supervised eight LBJ School of Public Affairs master’s reports; and member of 11 other master’s thesis and report committees at the iSchool, Moody College of Communication, and the College of Liberal Arts. Doty has also supervised several dozen individual study courses with iSchool MS and PhD students and co-published the results of some of that work with those students and been a faculty expert for eight senior thesis projects at St. Edward’s University in Austin.

Besides teaching with colleagues in the UT iSchool, he has co-taught courses with faculty and staff colleagues at UT in the LBJ School of Public Affairs, several departments in the Moody College of Communication, the Cockrell School of Engineering, the College of Liberal Arts, the College of Natural Sciences, the UT System Office of Legal Affairs, and the UT-Austin and UT System Office of Telecommunications.