Team

  • Miles Brundage serves as Executive Director at AVERI, where he sets AVERI’s strategic direction, leads the team, and builds partnerships to advance AVERI’s mission of making third party auditing of AI systems effective and universal. 

    Previously, Miles led the Policy Research and AGI Readiness teams at OpenAI, and before that he was a Research Fellow at the University of Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute. 

    In addition to leading AVERI, Miles is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Institute for Progress, a member of the AI Governance Forum at the Center for a New American Security, and a member of the EU AI Act Scientific Panel. He is an advisor to Epoch AI and the RAND Corporation, and he writes regularly on Substack. 

    Miles completed a Ph.D. in Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology from Arizona State University in 2019, and worked at the US Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) before beginning his graduate studies.

  • Carly Tryens leads Executive Operations at AVERI. In addition to supporting executive and organizational operations, she builds effective systems and cultivates behaviors to ensure AVERI’s highest goals are met.

    Carly has more than eight years of experience in a range of operations roles including founding and scaling high-impact startups and nonprofits. Before joining AVERI, she was a founding member of Blueprint Biosecurity, a pandemic prevention nonprofit, where she supported the executive team and fostered organizational culture. Prior to that, she was Chief of Staff at Alvea, a vaccine development startup that set the record as the fastest biotech company to move a new drug from idea to a Phase 1 clinical trial.

  • Sean McGregor is a machine learning safety researcher serving as Lead Research Engineer at AVERI, where he leads several projects centered on making third party auditing of AI systems effective and universal. His efforts include projects in metaevaluation and benchmarking.

    Previously, Sean helped found the Digital Safety Research Institute at the UL Research Institutes, launched the AI Incident Database, and trained edge neural network models for the neural accelerator startup Syntiant.

    With an applications-centered research program spanning reinforcement learning for wildfire suppression and deep learning for heliophysics, Sean has covered a wide range of safety critical domains. Sean's open source development work has earned media attention in the Atlantic, Der Spiegel, Wired, Venture Beat, Vice, and O'Reilly while his technical publications have appeared in a variety of machine learning, HCI, ethics, and application-centered proceedings.

  • Jacqueline Grimsley is the Operations Director at AVERI, where she leads operations strategy and oversees finance, administration, compliance, and human resources. She joins with 11 years of experience in nonprofit management, organizational development, and building sustainable systems to scale small organizations. She's especially drawn to early-stage work: setting up young organizations to scale successfully.

    Before joining AVERI, Jacqueline served as COO at Priorities USA for 5 years. Prior to that, she was Deputy Executive Director of Organizational Strategy at the Alliance for Youth Action. 

  • Nat Purser is the US Policy Director at AVERI, where she leads congressional engagement, federal and state policy strategy, and policy analysis on independent evaluations and auditing of frontier AI systems.

    Previously, she served as a Senior Policy Advocate at Public Knowledge, where she worked on artificial intelligence and telecommunications policy.

    Nat has also served as a Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) Fellow on Capitol Hill and worked on tech policy in the private sector and state government. Her writing has appeared in Asterisk Magazine, The Argument, and Light Reading.

    Nat received her bachelor's degree in Political Science from the University of North Georgia. She is based in Washington, DC.

  • George is Policy and Advocacy Lead at AVERI and leads the organization's work on building demand for frontier AI auditing. 

    Previously, George served as Co-Director for Defence & National Security at The Alan Turing Institute, where he directed a cross-functional research portfolio and led a team of 60 staff. He also founded the Centre for Emerging Technology and Security (CETaS), a research centre advising the national security community on the risks and opportunities of emerging technology.

    Prior to this, George worked for the British Government as a Researcher, Data Scientist, and Policy Specialist, developing and delivering early AI capabilities for the national security community.

  • Patricia Paskov is the Standards Director at AVERI, where she leads the development of standards for frontier AI auditing. Patricia is also an Adjunct Researcher at RAND, a Research Affiliate at the Oxford Martin AI Governance Initiative, and Faculty at the International Programme on AI Evaluation. She led the Resilience section of the 2026 International AI Safety Report, and her research has appeared in top AI/ML venues and been covered by outlets including Al Jazeera, the Financial Times, Fortune, MIT Technology Review China, and TIME.

    Previously, Patricia built machine learning models at Condé Nast and designed large-scale randomized controlled trials with the World Bank and Innovations for Poverty Action. She holds degrees in economics from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the Barcelona School of Economics, and the European University Institute, and is completing a DPhil in Engineering Science at the University of Oxford.

Board

Portrait of Max Henderson smiling man in a navy suit, light blue shirt, and dark tie against a white background.

  • Max is a board member at AVERI and the founder of Ergo Impact. A philanthropist and investor, Max has helped incubate, operate, and fund close to $1B of social good efforts across causes such as global health, science, nuclear security, and AI. Prior to his philanthropy work, Max was a tech founder and executive, having held product and GTM roles at CovidActNow, Firebase, Google, Oracle, Compass, etc.

Close-up of Mike McCormick with short, light brown hair, wearing a button-up denim shirt, looking at the camera with a slight smile

  • Mike is a board member at AVERI and the founder and CEO of Halcyon Futures, a nonprofit grant fund and venture capital fund dedicated to ensuring that AI is developed in ways that are safe, secure, and beneficial for humanity. Since founding Halcyon in 2023, Mike has helped establish more than sixteen new nonprofits and companies in the fields AI alignment, cybersecurity and global resilience, which have collectively raised more than a quarter-billion-dollars in follow-on funding. Prior to Halcyon, Mike was a Partner at the San Francisco-based venture capital firm GreatPoint Ventures.

  • Grace Werner is a board member at AVERI and Vice President of Growth at the Foundation for American Innovation (FAI). Previously, Grace co-founded AVERI and served as Chief of Staff and lead U.S. policy. Before joining AVERI, Grace worked in corporate strategy and national security technology program development.

Advisors

Portrait of David Duvenaud smiling man with shoulder-length red hair, a full beard, wearing a checkered button-up shirt, against a white background.

  • David Duvenaud is an Associate Professor in Computer Science and Statistics at the University of Toronto.  He holds a Sloan Research Fellowship, a Canada Research Chair in Generative Models, and a CIFAR AI chair.  He has over 50 publications in machine learning and artificial intelligence.  His postdoc was done at Harvard University and his Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge.  He is a Founding Member of the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence.  He recently spent 1.5 years at Anthropic, leading their Alignment Evaluations team, contributing to their Responsible Scaling Policy, and leading research projects on jailbreaks and sabotage.  He's also a co-director of the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society, a director of the AI Safety Foundation, and has been an advisor to Cohere.  He has also received a Google Faculty Award, and best paper awards at both the Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) conference and the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML).

  • A. Feder Cooper is an advisor to AVERI. His research contributions span privacy, security, scalable training algorithms, system evaluations, tech policy, and law. Much of this work has received awards at top AI/ML and other computing venues, and collaborations at the intersection of AI and law have been lauded as landmark work among AI/ML experts, technology law scholars and the popular press. Cooper is also an incoming (tenure-track) assistant professor at Yale University, starting in summer 2026.

Gillian Hadfield with shoulder-length gray hair smiling in front of a plain white background, wearing a light-colored blazer and a black-and-white polka-dot blouse.

  • Gillian K. Hadfield is an economist and legal scholar turned AI researcher thinking about how humans build the normative world and how to make sure AI plays by rules that make us all better off. She is the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of AI Alignment and Governance at the Whiting School of Engineering and the School of Government and Policy at Johns Hopkins University. She is professor of law (status-only) at the University of Toronto. Hadfield is a faculty member of the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence and is a Schmidt Sciences AI2050 Senior Fellow. Hadfield's research focuses on innovative design for legal, regulatory, and technical systems for AI, computational models of human normative systems, and building AI systems that understand and respond to human values and norms. She is a faculty aƯiliate at the Center for Human-Compatible AI at the University of California Berkeley and she previously served as the inaugural director and held the Schwartz Reisman Chair in Technology and Society at the University of Toronto. Her book Rules for a Flat World: Why Humans Invented Law and How to Reinvent It for a Complex Global Economy was published by Oxford University Press in 2017; a paperback edition with a new prologue on AI was published in 2020 and an audiobook version released in 2021.

Headshot of a Jose H. Orallo with dark hair and a beard, wearing a gray suit and a checkered shirt, smiling against a plain white background.

  • Jose H. Orallo is Director of Research at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge, UK, and Professor (on partial leave) at TU Valencia, Spain. His academic and research activities have spanned several areas of artificial intelligence, machine learning, data science and intelligence measurement, with a focus on a more insightful analysis of the capabilities, generality, progress, impact and risks of artificial intelligence. His research in the area of machine intelligence evaluation has been covered by several popular outlets, such as The Economist, WSJ, FT, New Scientist or Nature. He keeps exploring a more integrated view of the evaluation of natural and artificial intelligence, as vindicated in his book "The Measure of All Minds" (Cambridge University Press, 2017, PROSE Award 2018). His contribution to the field of AI safety relies on new technical AI evaluation paradigms that are explanatory and predictive about the outcomes of AI ecosystems, and could reliably inform scientists, policy-makers and regulators. He is a founder of aievaluation.substack.com and ai-evaluation.org. He is a member of AAAI, CAIRNE and ELLIS, and a EurAI Fellow.

Portrait of Bri Treece with shoulder-length wavy auburn hair, wearing a navy blazer, white top, and gold necklace, against white background.

  • Bri Treece is Co-founder and Chief Impact Officer of Fathom. With two decades of experience in healthcare and AI, Bri is a recognized leader in driving innovation, building strategic partnerships, and ensuring operational excellence. Most recently, she served as the COO of the Center for AI Safety (CAIS) and founded the Center for AI Safety Action Fund, an organization connecting technical AI experts with global government leadership.Before her work in AI, Bri was a health tech executive. She played a critical role in leading her digital health company to a successful acquisition. She then launched the U.S. market for an at-home lab testing company during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, addressing urgent public health needs during a global crisis.Beyond her professional endeavors, Bri is dedicated to community service. She mentors first-generation youth preparing for college through Oakland Promise and volunteers with Friends of Oakland Parks & Recreation.Bri holds an MBA from the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and a B.S. from Northwestern University.

  • Jeff Wu is an independent AI researcher.  He spent eight years working at OpenAI and Anthropic, where he did foundational work on language modeling and AI alignment.  His work includes training GPT-2, working on early versions of RLHF such as InstructGPT, and leading teams working on scalable oversight and interpretability. In addition to his research, Jeff contributes to open source software and web games, and helps various projects relating to AI safety and AI for social good.