Dr. Randall Hill, Vice Dean, Viterbi School of Engineering, Omar B. Milligan Professor in Computer Science (Games and Interactive Media), Executive Director, ICT, announced that
Dava Casoni has been promoted to Chief Compliance and Legal Officer – Executive Producer, ICT.
“We are proud to promote from within,” said Dr. Randall Hill. “And we are fortunate to have someone with Dava’s unique talents to serve on the ICT Leadership Team, and to ensure we remain in strict compliance on all our extensive legal responsibilities, as a University Affiliated Research Center (UARC), founded by the Department of Defense and sponsored by the US Army.”
Dava Casoni joined ICT in 2011, after a successful career as an attorney with senior roles at international law firms including Pillsbury (founded in 1868) and Milbank LLP (founded 1866), before founding her own boutique firm, Casoni Law, in 2009. She received her JD and LLM in General and International Law from Cornell Law School in 1996 and has substantial experience in negotiating and drafting complex transactions, financing, IP protection, and compliance matters, particularly in government and industry sponsored university research and export controls. Prior to law school, Casoni graduated Boston University on a U.S. Army ROTC scholarship and was commissioned into the Army Transportation Corps.
Casoni was an early and active member of the Association of University Export Control Officers, aiding in its growth from under 20 members to its current roster of over 400 across 250 institutions nationwide. In 2012, she was appointed by the Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs as a member of the Defense Trade Advisory Group (“DTAG”) and has served as an appointed member for twelve years. The DTAG is an advisory committee whose mission is to provide the Department of State’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs with a formal channel for regular consultation and coordination with the U.S. private sector defense trade specialists.
Alongside her legal role at ICT, Dava Casoni also leads (with Navy Captain and TV writer Ric Arthur) the Force Writers Room, which brings multi-disciplinary expertise, Hollywood creativity and proven “TV writers room” techniques to strategically analyze and previsualize future implementations of R&D, through workshops, scenario and use case generation, short films, graphic novels, and concept art.
Earlier this year, Dava Casoni was named 2024 Public Counsel of the Year by the American Media and Entertainment Counsel (AMEC), an 18-year-old organization with more than 14,000 in-house counsel and business executives from studios, networks, Guilds, talent agencies and major media and entertainment companies.