I came to AI safety from a fairly conventional academic path. D.Phil. in Experimental Social Psychology at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, postdoc on trust and social cohesion, faculty work at Yale-NUS, then a long stretch running multi-country research on trust, extremism, and intergroup relations across Southeast Asia. The connecting thread across all of it was understanding what makes societies cohere or come apart, and what kinds of public action move things in better directions.

The pivot into AI field-building started about two years ago. I led a published compute governance project through AISC in 2024-25, did a visiting scholar stint at Constellation, was selected as a Policy Primer Scholar at the Aspen Institute, and just completed another AISC project on designing a public response for safe and responsible AI. The more I worked in this space, the clearer it became that AI safety has serious technical and policy capacity but is comparatively thin on movement-building, public engagement, and the kind of organized civic response that emerging technologies of this consequence demand. That gap is where I want my work to be.

Right now I am building Steering AI, Together, a public-facing resource translating historical social movement strategy into the AI moment. I work with a small interdisciplinary team I have come to trust deeply, and have built relationships with people doing movement-building work in this space who I learn from constantly.