Our People
Team
Brittney Gallagher is Co-founder, Vice President, and Board Chair of the AI Objectives Institute, where she focuses on how people interact with the technologies reshaping our world. She is also Vice President of The Midas Project, an AI watchdog nonprofit that holds frontier AI developers accountable through research and advocacy. She has interviewed technologists and thought leaders for Digital Village, one of the longest-running public radio shows in Los Angeles, and appears on SciFi-preneurship with Phil Libin, which explores how science fiction has inspired creators.
Philip Moreira Tomei is Director of Research at the AI Objectives Institute. He trained as a cognitive scientist at the University of Oxford, focusing on cognitive linguistics and dynamical systems. He has developed technical model evaluations for AI systems with scholars from SERI MATS and worked with the OECD on EU policy design to enforce them. In 2023 he co-founded the NGO Pax Machina to research how AI risk can be integrated into financial markets.
Değer Turan is President of the AI Objectives Institute and CEO of Metaculus. As AOI's first Executive Director, he built the team, led fundraising, and developed Talk to the City, a platform that strengthens communication between under-resourced communities and the government officials who serve them. He previously founded Cerebra Technologies, which tracks public opinion trends for 300 million citizens and is used by governments, hedge funds, and international retailers.
Sonja Belkin is a Researcher at the AI Objectives Institute and a doctoral candidate at the London School of Economics. In her PhD, she uses computational and empirical methods to examine the role of AI in belief polarization in online information environments. Her broader research interests lie at the intersection of cognitive psychology, technology, and security, particularly how to design and regulate information ecosystems to make them resilient to AI-driven manipulation. Before her PhD, she completed an MPhil in Psychology at the University of Cambridge, using Bayesian belief networks to explore why belief polarization is greater on social policy issues than on economic ones.
Bouke Klein Teeselink is a Senior Research Fellow at the AI Objectives Institute, where he studies the effects of generative AI on labor markets. He is also an Assistant Professor of Economics at King's College London. His research examines how generative AI is changing employment and wages worldwide, how advances in AI capabilities will shift the expertise that occupations require, and how AI agents change consumer decision-making.
Anna Leshinskaya is Program Lead for Moral Learning at the AI Objectives Institute, where she studies how AI can learn in ways that are human-like and human-aligned. A computational cognitive neuroscientist, she researches learning and abstraction in human and artificial brains. She earned her PhD at Harvard University, investigating the neural organization of semantic memory, and most recently led an NSF-funded project at UC Davis on the computational principles of predictive learning.
Niamh Peren is a Strategic Advisor at the AI Objectives Institute, where she helps shape the organization's strategy, partnerships, and programs. She was previously Chief of Innovation & Strategy at Foresight Institute, where she led strategy and partnerships, ran its prize programs, and co-directed the Secure AI Grants initiative. She has also served as a Senior Fellow at the United Nations AI for Developing Nations Forum.
Jacob Schaal is a Research Fellow at the AI Objectives Institute, where he studies the effects of generative AI on labor markets with Bouke Klein Teeselink. His research examines whether AI constitutes seniority-biased technological change and how AI reshapes job tasks. He wrote the labor market section of the Transformative AI Strategy for Europe. He previously worked on EU AI policy at the think tank Pour Demain, and his commentary has appeared in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Handelsblatt.
Edmund Zagorin is Program Lead for the AI Supply Chain Observatory at the AI Objectives Institute, where he focuses on AI alignment issues in supply chains. He is the Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Arkestro, a predictive procurement platform, and previously advised large enterprises on applying game theory and behavioral science to procurement. A Forbes contributor on AI in procurement, he serves on the Thought Leadership Committee of the Institute for Supply Management.
Board
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Tasha McCauley is a technology entrepreneur living in Los Angeles. She is the former CEO of GeoSim Systems, and co-founder of Fellow Robots. In addition to serving on the board of AI Objectives Institute, she is on the board of the Centre for the Governance of AI, and was formerly on the board of OpenAI.
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Değer Turan is President of the AI Objectives Institute and CEO of Metaculus. As AOI’s first Executive Director, he built the team, led fundraising, and developed Talk to the City, a platform that strengthens communication between under-resourced communities and the government officials who serve them. He previously founded Cerebra Technologies, which tracks public opinion trends for 300 million citizens and is used by governments, hedge funds, and international retailers.
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Brittney Gallagher is Co-founder, Vice President, and Board Chair of the AI Objectives Institute, where she focuses on how people interact with the technologies reshaping our world. She is also Vice President of The Midas Project, an AI watchdog nonprofit that holds frontier AI developers accountable through research and advocacy. She has interviewed technologists and thought leaders for Digital Village, one of the longest-running public radio shows in Los Angeles, and appears on SciFi-preneurship with Phil Libin, which explores how science fiction has inspired creators.
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Timothy Telleen-Lawton is the former Head of Procurement for Anthropic. He previously lobbied for Environment America, worked on policy for Frontier Group, and ran political campaign offices. He holds an M.S. in Earth Systems from Stanford.
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Dr. Anders Sandberg is an academic in computational neuroscience, philosophy and futures studies. He is currently researcher at Institute of Future Studies (Stockholm) where he co-founded the Mimir Centre for Long Term Futures Studies. His research centres on management of low-probability high-impact risks, societal and ethical issues surrounding human enhancement and new technology, estimating the capabilities of future technologies, and very long-range futures. He was senior research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) at the University of Oxford 2006-2024. He is a research associate of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, the Center for the Study of Bioethics (Belgrade), and on the boards of ALLFED and AI Objectives Institute.
Advisors
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Brian Christian is the bestselling author of three acclaimed books of nonfiction about the interdisciplinary and human implications of computer science. The Most Human Human (2011) was a Wall Street Journal bestseller, New York Times Editors’ Choice, and New Yorker favorite book of the year. Algorithms to Live By (2016), with Tom Griffiths, was a #1 Audible bestseller, Amazon best science book of the year, and MIT Technology Review best book of the year. The Alignment Problem (2020) is a Los Angeles Times finalist for best science and technology book of the year. A visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, he lives in San Francisco.
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David A. Dalrymple (also known as “davidad”) recently completed a 2-year Research Fellowship at Oxford University, where he developed the Open Agency Architecture. He has backgrounds in theoretical computer science, applied mathematics, software engineering, and neuroinformatics. In 2008 he was the youngest person to receive a graduate degree from MIT, and he went on to study biophysics at Harvard. His neuroscience work has been funded directly by technology leaders such as Larry Page and Peter Thiel in their personal capacities. David has also worked in machine learning and software performance engineering at major tech companies and startups alike, and co-invented the top-40 cryptocurrency Filecoin with Protocol Labs, a decentralized technology firm where David continues to guide R&D strategy.
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Seth Lazar is a Professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Government and Policy and principal investigator of the MINT Lab. He is also a Research Scientist at Resolution. His research focuses on the philosophy of AI and computing, and on the defense, reinvigoration, and redesign of liberal democratic institutions for the AI transition.
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Colleen McKenzie is a researcher, designer, and product strategist, interested in exploring and improving humans' interaction with technology in a variety of contexts. She co-founded the Median Group, a scientific research nonprofit, where she explores technological trends and their societal impacts. Other past roles include Product Manager and Software Engineer at Google, Chief of Staff at the Center for Humane Technology, and Head of Product for distributed computing startup Kalix Systems. She holds a B.A. in Computer Science and Neuroscience from Columbia.
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Aviv Ovadya researches and supports tractable processes for technology governance and alignment, building on validated methods from offline deliberative democracy and innovative AI-augmented deliberation technology. He is affiliated with Harvard's Berkman Klein Center (RSM), a visiting researcher at Cambridge University's Center for the Future of Intelligence, and consults for technology companies, civil society organizations, and funders. Aviv’s related work explores how we can make our information ecosystem and decision-making systems robust in the face of new technologies. This has involved measurement, mapping harm dynamics, identifying potential levers, navigating limitations (e.g. of deepfake detection), and ensuring that social media ranking systems can bridge divides instead of fomenting division. Aviv's work has been covered regularly, including by the BBC, NPR, the Economist, and The New York Times and his writing has been published by Bloomberg, HBR, the MIT Technology Review, and the Washington Post
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Orowa Sikder focuses on Applied Research at Anthropic and is an advisor to Cophi, which uses computational methods to help organizations measure and improve collaboration. He is also finalizing a Computer Science PhD at University College London, focusing on mathematical methods to analyze network data. He previously trained in Economics and Philosophy at Oxford University. At AOI, he helped research methods to help language models better understand human preferences, beliefs and behaviors.
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Carroll “Max” Wainwright is an AI research scientist, technologist, and physicist. He is the co-founder and CTO of Metaculus, a crowd-sourced forecasting platform that predicts the future of AI progress along with other important topics. He previously worked at Partnership on AI, building reinforcement learning environments to benchmark AI safety. Before joining the AI research community, Carroll earned his doctorate studying the physics of the very early universe. He currently lives in San Francisco.
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Anna Yelizarova is co-founder of the Windfall Trust, a nonprofit preparing society for the economic disruption of transformative AI. She holds degrees in Computer Science and Communication from Stanford University and began her career as an engineer at Microsoft before moving into AI policy. Her recent work examines how advanced AI might alter labor, inequality, and governance systems, and she develops transformative AI economic scenarios, early-warning indicators, and policy strategies to help institutions prepare for a range of uncertain futures.
Collaborators
Allegra Cohen is a technologist focused on knowledge curation and large-scale qualitative data. She previously managed a DARPA research portfolio on how machines can help humans understand complex geopolitical systems. She holds a PhD in computational modeling from the University of Florida and a BS in Symbolic Systems from Stanford University.
Matija Franklin is a researcher at UCL interested in AI Safety and Alignment. Matija's current AI Safety projects include writing policy papers, conducting empirical research, and developing evals that try and address and understand AI Manipulation. For AI Alignment, Matija is currently focusing on exploring better methods for gathering human feedback to develop richer representations of human values, as well as exploring methods of AI Alignment that go beyond preferences.
Bill Gallagher is a backend software engineer with more than 10 years of experience across mobile games, med-tech, last-mile delivery logistics, and security. He holds a Bachelor of Music from California State University, Long Beach.
Peli Grietzer is a researcher and writer specializing in ML, philosophy, and literary studies. He has a PhD from Harvard Comparative Literature in collaboration with the HUJI Einstein Institute of Mathematics, where he wrote about a technical analogy between autoencoding and the idea of 'vibe.' He has also worked as a technical project manager in applied reinforcement learning.
Dylan Hadfield-Menell is an Assistant Professor of Artificial Intelligence and decision-making in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Berkeley. His research focuses on the value alignment problem in artificial intelligence. His goal is to design algorithms that learn about and pursue the intended goal of their users, designers, and society in general. He has focused on algorithms for human-robot interaction with unknown preferences and reliability engineering for learning systems. In his recent work, he has studied the limitations of proxy metrics in AI systems and the design of distributed control and verification mechanisms for autonomous agents, with a focus on aligning recommendation systems.
Natasha Jensen is a product strategist. Her past experience ranges from Product Manager at Google focusing on Speech for the Google Assistant to consumer credit fraud and research helping people use credit wisely at Capital One. She previously studied Mathematics and Brain and Cognitive Science at MIT.
Julia Jerome is an operations leader who began her career in technical theater and went on to work in scenic art, trade shows, circus arts, and large-scale installations. She led a team of project managers through Ginger's merger with Headspace and later helped establish two AI-focused companies.
TJ (Tushant Jha) was a research scholar at the Future of Humanity Institute (FHI). Their work focuses on AI strategy for beneficial use and agency amplification, with interdisciplinary engagement with complex economic systems, institutional economics and legal theory, and theories of deliberation and cooperation. They also do conceptual research on agent foundations and philosophy of knowledge and action, and the relevance for AI risk theory. In a previous life, they were a researcher in computational economics and algorithmic game theory.
Shu Yang Lin is a researcher and interaction designer who designs and codes interfaces to improve the quality of deliberation. With Digital Minister Audrey Tang, she helped establish PDIS, an innovation lab in the Taiwanese government focused on open government, social innovation, and youth councils. She also helped set up the Participation Officers Network, which hosted more than 100 cross-ministerial policymaking workshops. She holds master's degrees in Human-Computer Interaction from National Taiwan University and Interaction Design from the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design.
Dr. Bruno Marnette is a technology entrepreneur based in London. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from Oxford and an MSc in Cognitive Science from EHESS. He co-founded two VC-backed AI-driven companies. As CTO and Head of Product at Enki, he impacted millions of students by enabling mobile coding education. As CEO of Prodo, he pioneered AI-powered code generation. Bruno also played key roles at Meta, where he developed novel infrastructure to combat misinformation. He also co-founded Depolarized AI, a nonprofit initiative promoting productive online debates.
Dr. Michael McCoy is a mathematician and technologist focused on advancing AI to improve human lives. As the co-founder and CTO of Exclosure, he has spearheaded the development of innovative satellite tracking technology, serving a wide range of clients, including the US Space Force. His expertise spans AI, self-driving cars, cybersecurity, and advanced cryptographic techniques. Holding a Ph.D. in Applied and Computational Mathematics from Caltech, Dr. McCoy's work lies at the intersection of AI, machine learning, and human cognition, with a commitment to ensuring that AI's benefits are broadly shared, empowering individuals and enhancing societal well-being.
Catherine (Cat) Mooney is an agent of elegant chaos and technological transformation. She serves as a Technical Program Manager at Okta, where she convenes strategy conversations for the fastest growing identity company on the Internet.
Portia Murray is an experienced researcher, team builder, engineer and product strategist focused on tackling large scale data privacy and security problems. Her most recent work at Apple was building tools to enable increased transparency into first- and third-party data privacy practices for users of MacOS and iOS. She also contributed to infrastructure security and AI/ML products during her time at Apple. Her past roles include Data Scientist/Researcher at PAX Labs, where she authored human usage studies for the FDA and built predictive algorithms, and Software Engineer at Knight Foundation-funded efforts such as Project Gitenberg, known now as the Free eBook Foundation.
Max Shron is a data scientist, author, and entrepreneur. He is currently the Director of Data at Warby Parker, where his work often involves aligning definitions, metrics, models, and feedback loops to the company's values. Prior to his work at Warby Parker, Max founded and ran Polynumeral, a team of data scientists who consulted for major NGOs, media companies, and tech startups on a wide variety of projects. He's the author of Thinking With Data (O'Reilly, 2014).
Justin Stimatze is an engineering leader with a PhD in Physics and a background spanning software engineering, management, and academia. He has worked on projects in logistics, mapping and location technology, gaming, research, and dialog management.
Darko Stojilović is a researcher with extensive experience in industry, NGOs, and academia. He holds MSc degrees in Cognitive and Decision Sciences from UCL and in Psychology from the University of Belgrade. Darko’s current interests focus on moral psychology and AI ethics, with a particular interest in understanding the moral responsibility of AI systems. His work is dedicated to shaping legal guidelines for assigning liability in instances where AI cause harm.
Stacey Svetlichnaya was a deep learning engineer at Weights & Biases, where she built developer tools for visualization, explainability, reproducibility, and collaboration in AI. She's not sure if climate change or AI safety is the bigger existential threat, so she strives to maximize impact on both. She enjoys the intersection of machine learning research, application, and UX, mostly for vision & language models. Previously, she worked on image search, productionizing ML systems, and discovery & recommendation on Flickr, following the acquisition of LookFlow, a visual similarity search engine. Stacey holds a Stanford BS '11 and MS '12 in Symbolic Systems, focusing on neuroscience.
Pawel Sysiak is a product designer and writer with more than a decade of experience in UI/UX design and user research. He was previously a Staff Product Designer at Plume Design, where he led the redesign of its design system. In 2016 he created AI Revolution magazine. He writes about epistemology and collective coordination at pawel.world, has exhibited his art internationally, and holds an MFA from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw.
Zoey Tseng is an independent researcher specializing in public goods and self-sovereign identity. Active in the g0v community, she has researched new government funding mechanisms for open-source projects. She has worked with Taiwan's Ministry of Digital Affairs on web3 and AI projects, including deploying Talk to the City, and has facilitated deliberation workshops in Taiwan on the impact of large language models.
Emre Turan is a data scientist who studied statistics and data science at UCLA. He has built a multimodal, AI-powered WhatsApp agent, developed AI agents for quantitative and fundamental trading at Generative Alpha, and created adaptive day-trading strategies at Explomind.