MATS mentors are advancing the frontiers of AI alignment, transparency, and security
Sambhav is a research associate on the Frontier Security team at IAPS, where he focuses on AI deployments in defense and national security, standards for internally deployed models, and threat modeling.
Before joining IAPS, Sambhav served as Co-director of the Cambridge AI Safety Hub, where he ran the MARS (Mentorship for Alignment Research Students) program.
Jan is a researcher at the Institute for AI Policy and Strategy (IAPS), where he works on technical AI governance to reduce catastrophic risk from AI. He is currently threat modelling how national security uses of frontier AI could go really badly and developing honeypots to secure internal AI agents.
Before joining IAPS, he was a GovAI winter fellow, a Pivotal fellow and a PhD candidate at the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security. His past research spans Interpretability, ML security and AI Alignment. He holds a BA in Information Systems and a MSc in CS.
Alex is a co-founder of Resolution, a research nonprofit using empirics, theory, and automation to get to higher confidence in alignment. He previously worked at the UK AI Security Institute, where he led strategy and operations for the £30m Alignment Project. Before that, he built 80,000 Hours’ automated headhunting product, which has made 50+ placements in AI safety and governance. He also co-founded LASR and Leaf, and co-authored the original Effective Altruism introductory programme curriculum.
Samuel Hammond is director of Artificial Intelligence Policy and chief economist at the Foundation for American Innovation, where his research focuses on artificial intelligence and the institutional impact of emerging technologies. He previously worked as the director of social policy for the Niskanen Center, where he remains a senior fellow; as an economist for the Government of Canada specializing in regional economic development; and as a graduate research fellow for the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.
Sam received a BA in economics from Saint Mary’s University and an MA in economics from George Mason University and Carleton University.
Rhys is the research director of Arrow: a new AI safety non-profit based in London.
He is currently most excited about working on alignment science (e.g., model organisms research) and technical governance style work which reduces public uncertainty regarding important questions (e.g., his recent work on no-CoT time-horizons).
Rhys started working on AGI risk in 2019. He has previously worked at: Redwood Research, LawZero, UK AISI, GovAI, CLR, and the Centre for Assuring Autonomy. He did his PhD in AI Deception at Imperial College London.
Shoshannah Tekofsky is a member of technical staff at Sage, the nonprofit that runs AI Digest and the AI Village. Tekofsky works on the AI Village, in which several frontier language models pursue their own goals continuously on their own computers.
Nathan Lambert works at a stealth post-training nonprofit. Lambert was previously the post-training lead at the Allen Institute for AI.
Coleman Breen works at SecureBio on technical evaluations of coding agents, EU AI Act implementation, and policymaker engagement. Before SecureBio, Breen was a fellow at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security working on AIxBio policy.
Peter Peneder is a research scientist on SecureBio's AI & Biotechnology Risks team, where his work focuses on building evaluations that assess the biorisk posed by frontier AI models. Peneder previously developed multimodal deep learning approaches for biomedical data during a PhD in bioinformatics.
Nelly Mak is a research scientist on SecureBio's AI team, working on AIxBio evaluations and safeguards against AI-enabled biorisks. Mak previously completed a postdoc in the Jolly lab on HIV induction of tissue residency, and holds a PhD on the natural hosts of zoonotic viruses.