Dhairya Dalal

Dhairya is a Research Manager at MATS, where he supports scholars and mentors advancing research on AI safety and alignment. Prior to MATS, he held senior research, applied AI engineering, and technical project management roles across early-stage startups, industry, academia, and nonprofits. Most recently, he worked on agentic causal inference and discovery in complex systems at Causely, and served as a technical project manager at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence and the Allen Institute for Brain Science. Dhairya co-founded the social impact nonprofit City Awake and has served in advisory roles at the Boston Museum of Science and the Peace Action Training and Research Institute in Romania. Dhairya earned a doctorate in Computer Science from the University of Galway, where his research focused on improving fundamental causal reasoning in LLMs and causal knowledge representation. He additionally holds a master's in Computer Science from Harvard University, where he worked on reinforcement learning for dialog systems, and a bachelor's from the University of Rochester, where he studied English and Interdisciplinary Studies in social and political thought.