Global Priorities Fellows - The new 2020 cohort
The Forethought Foundation is excited to announce its new cohort of Global Priorities Fellows. To see all 2019 fellows returning for the 2020 fellowship, please see this page.
Adam Gibbons
Adam Gibbons is a PhD student in philosophy at Rutgers University. His research lies at the intersection of political philosophy, political science, and political economy. He is mostly interested in various issues related to institutional design and how those might apply to global priorities research. Outside of his research on aspects of institutional design, he is interested in philosophy of language and philosophical methodology. He also holds a BA in Philosophy and an MA in Consciousness and Embodiment, both from University College Dublin.
Ali Merali
Ali Merali is a Londoner and economics PhD student at Yale University. His research interests are in game theory and mechanism design looking at how to model strategic interactions between individuals and AIs and developing robust mechanisms fit for the far future. Previous work has also looked at the use of prediction and decision markets to aggregate information efficiently and lead to better decision making in the contexts of both companies and governments.
Bridget Williams
Bridget Williams will commence graduate studies in ethics in September 2020. Her primary research interest is the ethics of priority-setting for population health, particularly the question of how concern for future generations should influence global health priorities. Bridget is a medical doctor, specializing in public health medicine, and has been involved in several research projects evaluating policy choices for population health. Bridget completed her medical studies at Monash University, with honours research in medical ethics conducted at the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics. She also holds a Masters of Public Health from the University of Sydney.
Calvin Baker
Calvin Baker is a PhD student in philosophy at Princeton University. His research focuses on ethical theory, Buddhist philosophy, and global priorities research. Before starting at Princeton, Calvin completed a MA in religion (Buddhist studies) at the University of Bristol, where he was a U.S. Fulbright Scholar, and a BA in philosophy at Stanford University.
Daniel Kokotajlo
Daniel Kokotajlo is a PhD student in philosophy at UNC Chapel Hill. He also works part-time for AI Impacts, a small research institute focused on AI forecasting. His philosophical work is in formal epistemology, on anthropics and decision theory primarily. His dissertation aims to be an introduction, overview, and investigation into the fascinating phenomenon of acausal trade. For AI Impacts he does a variety of things; currently he is interested in the Agent vs. Tool debate and the question of whether soft/continuous takeoff could lead to decisive strategic advantage. Ultimately he hopes to contribute to solving the commitment races problem.
Dillon Bowen
Dillon Bowen a PhD candidate in decision science based in Philadelphia. His research focuses on cyber forecasting - combining expert human judgment with machine learning algorithms to anticipate geopolitical events. Dillon hopes to design machine learning tools to aid experts in predicting and preempting existential catastrophes.
Edward Davenport
Edward Davenport is a PhD student in the Department of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research interests are in development economics, behavioural economics, international trade, and how individual policies in these areas translate into economic growth. Prior to MIT, he completed a BSc and MSc in Economics at the London School of Economics and worked in the private sector in London for two years. He is also a 2019 Kennedy Scholar.
Emma Curran
Emma Curran is a PhD student in Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. Her doctoral research focuses on the sorts of moral obligations we might have to help others in need, especially those in the far future. Beyond her doctoral work, she has research interests in the ethics of harm, including self-defence and risk imposition. She is also interested in metaphysical and moral issues in the philosophy of death. Before beginning her PhD, Emma completed her masters at Cambridge and her undergraduate at the London School of Economics and Political Science
Isabel Juniewicz
Isabel Juniewicz is pursuing a PhD in Economics at UCLA. Her fields are labor and theory, with an interest in social learning and the long run impact of institutions. Prior to starting her PhD, Isabel completed an undergraduate degree in economics, mathematics, statistics and computer science at Rutgers University and worked as a research assistant at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors.
Jens Jaeger
Jens Jaeger is a PhD student in philosophy at New York University. His research interests include philosophy of science (especially physics), formal epistemology, and ethics. He is particularly excited by problems which combine elements of two or more of these areas. Before coming to New York University, he did his undergraduate studies in physics at ETH Zurich, followed by a B.Phil. in philosophy at Oxford University.
Jonas Kurle
Jonas Kurle is a PhD student in economics at the University of Oxford. His research focuses on econometric methods for modelling structural breaks and outliers of random variables and forecasting. He is also interested in detecting changes in trends and parameter non-constancy in econometric models. Besides, he is applying these methods to environmental and climate-related data in order to improve our understanding of the interactions between economic activity and climate change.
Kine Josefine Aurland-Bredesen
Kine Josefine Aurland-Bredesen is a Ph.D. Research Fellow in Economics at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences. Her primary focus is the optimal economic management of catastrophic risk. In her research, she explores methodological challenges, welfare consequences, and different responses to catastrophic risk. Apart from catastrophic risk, Kine's research interest includes environmental economics, decision theory, risk, uncertainty, and wicked problems.
Lingxi Chenyang
Lingxi Chenyang is a philosophy Ph.D. student at the University of Michigan and joint J.D. at Yale Law School. Lingxi is originally from Chengdu, China and graduated from Dartmouth College in 2014 with a B.A. in philosophy. Her research interests are multidisciplinary, lying at the intersection of moral psychology, energy ethics and economics, landscape ecology, and private and public law. She has published work on the merits of reducing meat demand as a climate policy strategy. Lingxi is currently researching the comparative values of human density and species biodiversity, and how land use law can become more climate resilient by incorporating biodiversity as a goal.
Martin Vaeth
Martin Vaeth is a PhD student in economics at Princeton University. His research interests lie in decision and game theory, with a focus on deviations from expected utility theory. He is currently interested in how to make good decisions under severe uncertainty/ambiguity. Prior to starting at Princeton, he studied mathematics, economics and philosophy at the University of Heidelberg and the London School of Economics.
Mattie Toma
Mattie Toma is a PhD student in economics at Harvard University. Her research interests include behavioral and experimental economics. She is currently working on projects ranging from exploring the use of behavioral interventions to improve health outcomes to better understanding the role of beliefs in improving treatment efficacy.
Peter Park
Peter S. Park is a Harvard mathematics Ph.D. student researching group dynamics, with a particular focus on human decision-making and cooperation. He hopes to explain information frictions that are considered cognitive biases today as potentially arising from rational strategies: specifically, those maximizing evolutionary fitness within an informational cost-benefit structure from the group-oriented past. Before becoming involved in the effective-altruism community of the Boston/Cambridge area, he was a pure mathematician, having majored in math at Princeton University while publishing eight papers in number theory and algebra. He is American but has spent most of his life in South Korea.
Scott Behmer
Scott Behmer is a second year economics PhD student at the University of Chicago. In his research, he hopes to apply tools and ideas from political economy to important questions in public economics. Before the PhD program, he received an MA in economics from the University of Chicago and a BS in physics from Purdue University.
Sven Neth
Sven Neth is currently a PhD Candidate in Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. Sven is interested in decision theory, with focus on the value of information. In particular, how should we decide between acting now and learning more information? In addition, Sven is interested in Bayesian epistemology. Sven is originally from Germany and did his undergraduate work at the Free University of Berlin. In the summer of 2019, Sven was visiting Oxford's Global Priorities Institute as part of the Early Career Conference Programme.
Weng Kin San
Weng Kin San is a PhD student in philosophy at the University of Southern California. Before that, he did the BPhil in philosophy at the University of Oxford and a joint undergraduate degree between the National University of Singapore and the Australian National University. He works in a wide range of areas in philosophy, with a particular focus on epistemology and logic. He is interested in the potential applications of recent work and advances in decision to the question of how to do most good given limited resources.