MATS mentors are advancing the frontiers of AI alignment, transparency, and security
Kaiwen is a researcher at OpenAI working on AI Safety and RL. He earned his Ph.D. from Cornell Tech, where he researched and taught RL, causal inference, and LLMs.
He previously worked at Google, Microsoft, and Netflix on projects spanning core RL theory to scalable LLM algorithms. Before grad school, Kaiwen spent two years at Facebook building the RL Platform.
Sam is a Research Engineer on OpenAI’s Alignment team. He previously worked in NYU’s Alignment Research Group on scalable oversight and as a Software Engineer at Amazon. His research includes training language models to win debates with self-play, and recent OpenAI work on auto-review for agent actions.
Janika Schmitt is a Program Officer at Sentinel Bio, a philanthropic fund focused on biotechnology governance.
Previously, she was a Non-Resident Fellow at the Institute for Progress, conducted virology research for her medical doctorate at the University of Cambridge, and worked on pathogen early warning at MIT. She has held fellowships at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, the German Center for Infection Research, and Foresight Institute.
Janika is a licensed physician in Germany and studied medicine in Heidelberg, Oxford, and at Charité Berlin.
I work on AI assurance and civilisational resilience: building the technical foundations for independently verifiable claims about the behaviour of AI systems and the infrastructure they run on — from secure silicon to software to multi-stakeholder coordination. Currently, I'm a Programme Director at the UK's Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA). I run the Safeguarded AI programme, a ~£60M R&D programme building a mathematical assurance toolkit that lets fleets of AI agents produce formally verified artifacts at unprecedented speed and scale - from verified software, to microelectronics to a wide range of cyberphysical control systems. Before ARIA, I co-founded and led Principles of Intelligence (formerly PIBBSS), a research organisation facilitating knowledge transfer from interdisciplinary sciences into AI safety. I've also been a Research Affiliate with the Alignment of Complex Systems research group, and a Research Manager at the Future of Humanity Institute, University of Oxford.
Alex Chan is Chief Scientist at Asymmetric Security, working on AI for cyberdefense and incident response. Previously, Chan was Director of Software Engineering at Salesforce, leading reinforcement-learning post-training for GUI agents.
Dillon is the Chief Scientist at Eleos AI Research, where he leads the organization's empirical research on the sentience, moral status, and potential well-being of AI systems. Before joining Eleos, he was an Anthropic Fellow and a postdoc in the Subjectivity Lab. He did his PhD in cognitive neuroscience in Josh Greene's lab at Harvard and his BA in philosophy, also at Harvard.
Pegah Maham is a Policy Development and Strategy Manager within Google DeepMind’s Frontier Policy Development team, where she works at the intersection of technical AI safety and security and international governance. Her work is focused on frontier AI risks, such as biosecurity and AGI safety. Topics she is thinking about include risk assessments and mitigations, threat modelling, external testing, transparency, system integrity and model weight security.
Geoff was a partner at Y Combinator beginning in 2011 and served as president of the accelerator from early 2019 until the end of 2022. Geoff has worked with hundreds of YC companies like Stripe, Ginkgo, Clever, Helion and Boom and has been an angel investor in over 100 companies. Earlier in his career Geoff was part of the team that built Yahoo! Mail and was Yahoo!’s Chief Product Officer until 2006. Geoff was also CEO of Lala Media, which was purchased by Apple in 2009.
Charlie is co-head of Intercept, a $500 million fund launched from Stripe's Public Goods team to reduce the burden of respiratory infections. Charlie was previously a Managing Director at the Global Health Investment Corporation and a co-founder of Adjuvant Capital. Before his career in public health investing, he was a private equity investor at Artemis Capital Partners and Axia Capital. Charlie started his career at Haiti’s largest microfinance bank, Sevis Finansye Fonkoze.
Charlie has led or participated in investments in Curevo Vaccine (acquired by Eli Lilly), Vaccine Company (acquired by Eli Lilly), Alydia Health (acquired by Merck), Iantech (acquired by Carl Zeiss Meditec), Eubiologics (Kosdaq:206650), MDGH (PRV), Terrestrial Bio, Foundry, Centivax, Excision Biotherapeutics, Codagnix, Endpoint Health, Cytovale, and Monod Bio. He currently serves on the boards of Curevo Vaccine, Aceris Biosciences, Blueprint Biosecurity, ProEquip, and the Mirror Biology Dialogues Fund.
Mirko is a research scientist with over 15 years of experience in Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing, specializing in applied research across diverse industries.
His expertise spans Python, Pytorch, TensorFlow, and NLP frameworks like Hugging Face, enabling him to drive impactful machine learning solutions for businesses.
Mirko is passionate about optimizing deep learning model performance and advancing software engineering best practices in deep learning projects.