Draft:Cory Alpert

Cory Alpert is a political strategist and academic. He was the senior advisor to Stephen K. Benjamin (then the Mayor of Columbia, South Carolina and the President of the United States Conference of Mayors), and is well-known for his work in connecting technology and civil society.

Cory Alpert attended the University of South Carolina for his undergraduate degree, where he studied sociology and Russian. He received the Steven N. Swanger Leadership Award. He led the University's voter registration initiative, Lead the Way, which partnered with the entire University of South Carolina System and Clemson University to register more than 5,000 voters. The initiative was also praised for its innovative partnerships with the University's athletics department, the South Carolina Gamecocks. He graduated in 2017, when he brought António Guterres, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, to speak at the University's commencement.

Career

While in high school and during his undergraduate degree, he was a company member at Trustus Theatre in Columbia. In addition to his work leading the University's voter registration efforts, he also launched UofSC Relief in response to Hurricane Joaquin, which directly hit South Carolina in 2015. Those efforts later became known as Columbia Relief, which assisted the United States Conference of Mayors in its work to support other cities affected by natural disasters, including Baton Rouge, Louisiana and Houston, Texas. Again, Alpert leveraged partnerships with athletics departments for these efforts.

He later worked with Mayor Stephen K. Benjamin, first as his campaign manager, then as a senior advisor for policy, where he focused on international relations and climate change in the first year of the Presidency of Donald Trump.

In subsequent years, he worked with political candidates like Andrew Gillum and James A. Smith (politician). In the 2020 Presidential cycle, he was one of the first hires for Pete Buttigieg's 2020 Presidential campaign, where he became a trusted aide supporting the campaign's work across the Southeast. Following the Buttigieg campaign, he went on to work for the Joe Biden 2020 presidential campaign as an advance lead for Doug Emhoff.

Alpert later followed Emhoff in the White House as an advance staffer, including supporting Emhoff's historic visit to Auschwitz concentration camp. Alpert also worked as the senior advisor to the AI for Good Foundation, which created and launched the humanitarian response technology in Ukraine, in partnership with Volodymyr Zelenskyy's administration. He also began working with national voter registration organizations to register and engage young voters, including launching Secure the Ballot and as the chief strategist for Field Team 6. With Field Team 6, he is known for his work producing America Needs a Queen, which brought together talent from RuPaul's Drag Race, Legendary (TV series), and Queen of the Universe (TV series), including Detox (drag queen), Alaska Thunderfuck, Brita Filter, and more to register new voters ahead of the 2022 United States elections.

In 2024, Alpert begun working on his PhD at the University of Melbourne, studying the impact of AI on democracy. In addition to his PhD, he was also acknowledged as part of the "red team", testing OpenAI's ChatGPT models.

Personal life

Cory Alpert is the son of Geoffrey Alpert, a criminology professor at the University of South Carolina and Griffith University. He is the grandson of Harry Alpert, the founder of the social science division of the National Science Foundation and former Deputy Director of UNESCO.