MATS mentors are advancing the frontiers of AI alignment, transparency, and security
I am a researcher on the Biosecurity and Pandemic Preparedness team at Coefficient Giving, where I investigate risks from biology, and also think about whether AI could enable other dangerous technologies. Prior to this I worked at the Future of Humanity Institute, and before that completed a PhD in physics at Princeton.
Evan is a research scientist at SecureBio Detection, where he works on computational pipelines and detection methods for uncovering threats in deep metagenomic sequencing data. Prior to transitioning his career into biosecurity, he was the VP of data science and engineering at Zoba, a startup providing optimization services to the shared mobility industry. He holds a PhD in operations research and, in his free time, devotes lots of thought cycles to sourdough pizza.
Xiangyu is a researcher at OpenAI, where he works to make LLMs robust. Previously, he obtained his Ph.D. from Princeton University, advised by Prof. Prateek Mittal and Prof. Peter Henderson.
Ollie is a researcher on OpenAI’s Alignment team interested in red-teaming and control. He was previously on the Control team at UK AISI.
Tom is a research scientist at OpenAI, working on interpretability of language models, for AI safety. He was also a core developer of scikit-learn between 2015 and 2022.
I am group leader at the University of Oxford working in protein chemistry and machine learning. Our field has had huge success with AI but these successes come with potential catastrophic risks much of research focus on responsible innovation and biosecurity along side the more academic work in biophysics and protein design. I am interested in empirical studies that can support biosecurity and foundational biosecurity work that sits closer to policy.
Juan is a researcher in OpenAI’s Safety Systems team. He is broadly interested in mitigating catastrophic risks. He works on adversarial robustness training and automated red-teaming (recent work https://openai.com/index/instruction-hierarchy-challenge/).
Rosie Campbell is Managing Director at Eleos AI Research, a non-profit that researches AI consciousness and welfare. She previously worked on frontier policy issues at OpenAI such as dangerous capability evaulations. Before that, she was Head of Safety-Critical AI at the Partnership on AI and Assistant Director of UC Berkeley's Center for Human-Compatible AI. She has a background as a research engineer and holds degrees in Physics and Computer Science.
Kaiwen is a researcher at OpenAI working on AI Safety and RL. He earned my 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. 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.
Mike has spent his career in startups and venture capital. Prior to founding Halcyon, he was a partner at GPV, a VC firm managing more than $1 billion in capital. He was an early investor in several unicorn companies.
Since 2022, Mike has been focused on grants, investments and incubating new projects in AI security and global resilience.
Roland works as a Research Scientist at Google DeepMind as a member of the AGI Safety and Alignment team. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Tuebingen / MPI-IS working with Wieland Brendel on interpretability, robustness and learning theory. His current work is focussed on evaluations and mitigations for deceptive alignment and scheming. More generally, he is interested in understanding the behavior, capabilities and limitations of AIs and their training procedures to increase trust and safety.
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 microelectornics to a wide range of cyberphyiscal 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.
Lisa is the CEO of Security Level 5, an AI Security Tech Lab she founded with the mission to create the technical and strategic optionality for frontier AI labs to reach SL5 (security against priority nation state attacks) for their core internal operations in the coming years. Her team developed the world’s first SL5 Standard, as well as is currently prototyping mock SL5 datacenters in coordination with frontier AI labs. The SL5 work brought together 100+ security engineering specialists across frontier AI labs, the US intelligence community and broader AI Security ecosystem to chart the technical path towards reaching nation-state secure AI Datacenters and frontier AI workflows by 2028. Lisa’s background includes a BSc in Computer Science from TUM, Graduate Machine Learning Research at Georgia Tech, as well as an AI Security DPhil researcher affiliation at the Oxford HAIGL Lab. Previous to founding SL5, Lisa was a senior director at IST, research lead at MIRI where she founded and lead the technical governance team (verification, hardware security, etc), as well as participated in MATS3 as a mentee under Alex Turner in 2023 where she helped pioneer the technique of activation steering. Lisa has been a 2026 FLI Fellow, 2025 Brains Fellow, 2024 Foresight Fellow, Fulbright Scholar and participant in Entrepreneur First and 5050 by 50Years.
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.
I work at the intersection of frontier AI and high-security systems. My focus is turning abstract safety and security requirements into deployable technical artifacts that can withstand real adversaries, from nation-state attacks to loss-of-control scenarios.
focus areas:
- Frontier AI Security (SL5): Securing model weights, inference systems, and lab infrastructure against nation-state threats and loss-of-control failure modes.
- AI Alignment and Interpretability: Mechanistic interpretability, scalable oversight, and monitoring-based interventions.
- Security Engineering: Air-gapped deployments, attack surface minimization, and high-assurance runtime design.
Alexander Meinke is Head of Research at Apollo Research. His team empirically studies how "scheming" can emerge in future AI systems.
He started working on AI safety research in 2023 with Owain Evans in the MATS 4.0 cohort.
Before that, he completed his PhD on adversarial robustness at the University of Tübingen, Germany. He holds a B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Physics.
I work at Thinking Machines and previously co-founded Workshop Labs. I've written pieces including the scenario "A History of the Future" and co-authored The Intelligence Curse. Before that, I worked on AI safety research (including at MATS).