Brooke Istook is a child safety researcher, strategist, and adviser with more than a decade of experience at the intersection of technology, platform design, and child protection.
As Chief Impact Officer at Heat Initiative, she leads research, legal pressure campaigns, and strategic initiatives aimed at compelling major technology companies to strengthen protections for minors. Before that, she spent nine years as Vice President at Thorn, where she built the tools, research infrastructure, and education programs that now operate at scale - including Spotlight, used by 12,000+ law enforcement investigators across the U.S. and Canada and supporting the identification of more than 22,000 child victims of trafficking.
She has advised major technology platforms on child safety design, briefed government officials, and presented at Interpol and U.S. embassies across India. Her work sits at the intersection of platform accountability, safety-by-design, and the structural conditions that determine what children actually experience online.
She holds a Master's in International Development and a B.S. in Management Information Systems. She lives in Fort Worth, Texas, with her three boys.