Lisa Thiergart

Lisa is the research manager at MIRI  and leads the newly formed technical governance team. Lisa has a BSc in Computer Science from TU Munich and specialized in ML research at Georgia Tech, including some research on RLHF for robotic control. Lisa also studied partial degrees in neuroscience and medicine and holds a graduate degree in technology management. Lisa was a MATS 3.0 and 3.1 scholar mentored by Alex Turner where she worked on model internals and contributed to the new technique of activation additions. After MATS, Lisa joined MIRI where she’s been working on research management, strategy and new research directions during the last year. Lisa is also a fellow and AI safety grant advisor at the Foresight Institute, where she explores whole brain emulation and its potential for AI safety. After focussing primarily on technical alignment research, this spring Lisa opened a new team at MIRI in response to rapid developments in the AI policy space and the need for further technical governance research bridging the gap between current safety standards and possible future government regulation which could provide strong safety cases. The team may be recruiting next year, and strong scholars could potentially be hired to continue at MIRI after MATS.