CFAR Team

Pete worked as a software architect and consultant before getting serious about developmental psychology. He cofounded an emotional intelligence and communication training organization, and he joined CFAR after helping on several projects including EA Global and EA Action.

Anna has previously done machine learning research for NASA and applied mathematics research on the statistics of phage metagenomics. She holds a degree in mathematics from UC Santa Barbara.

Michael holds a joint Ph.D. in mathematics and science education from UC San Diego and San Diego State University. He has extensive experience with teaching and curriculum design in academics, martial arts, and now, rationality workshops.

Duncan is a writer, filmmaker, and educator, whose previous work included developing and teaching a special projects class for building rationality and agency in middle schoolers.

Dan has researched the psychology of judgment and decision making and published a paper on the science of human rationality. He holds a master’s degree in social psychology from Cornell and a BA in mathematics and statistics from Swarthmore.

Before CFAR, Lauren worked as an iOS Developer, organized the Seattle rationality community, studied biology at Caltech, and competed on the Magic: The Gathering Pro Tour.

This Jack of all trades coordinates logistics, ensuring that CFAR’s workshops meet and exceed participants’ expectations. They draw on their background in psychology and event planning to do this.

Adom likes everything except for opportunity cost. He's looking for ways to make the world more sensible, and for ways to get people to work together.

Elizabeth is an aspiring dicentenarian, former unschooler, and the current Chief of the awesome Event Horizon house in Berkeley.

Adam has previously worked in politics, journalism and startups. He aspires to live in Star Wars and loves slime mold, ctenophores, weird timbres, metaethics, working memory optimization, David Attenborough, logical empiricism, swarms, sensible incentive structures and weddell seals.

Ben was a mechanical engineer before starting at CFAR. He enjoys learning new things, like who people are and what they think about, and rock climbing (his favorite game).

Eli is a mostly-independent researcher doing work on psychology and rationality. He has formerly worked as as a clinical hypnotherapist, and has a background in "great books" and classic philosophy. He wants to make the world better and help the people around them become stronger.

Michael is a software developer and entrepreneur who writes software and provides tech support to CFAR and several EA organizations.

Ben received his Bachelor's in Science, Technology, and International Affairs from Georgetown University. He currently works at Google as a Technical Solutions Consultant. In his free time he enjoys brainstorming what the worst startup idea of all time would be.

Eric likes math puzzles, racquet sports, and people. He spends his days making Arbital.com. His quest is to understand the Universe, and he's surprisingly capable of juggling.

Jordan counts things. He also works as a math instructor and is interested in developing higher education classes to promote rationality.

Matt worked as a data scientist in industry before becoming a staff writer for MIRI. His interests are in machine learning, efficiency, rationality, and the future. He has degrees in operations research, physics, and economics.

Oliver is a German expat studying computer science, math and whatever else currently comes into his mind. He is working on schemes involving rationality, Effective Altruism and building communities that will effectively solve the world's most important challenges.

Qiaochu is a Ph.D. student in mathematics at UC Berkeley on an NSF fellowship with an extensive background in category theory, algebraic topology, and related subjects. He has written thousands of answers to other people's questions about mathematics on Quora, MathOverflow, and math.stackexchange, and is currently in the process of learning about machine learning.

Steph is a web developer with experience at Google and Arbital.com. She likes fire, adventures, dogs, and interesting road maps of human cognition. She's currently looking for levers she can use to nudge the universe in the right direction.

Tim enjoys empowering people, playing games, imagining possible futures, and being silly. He's currently taking a sabbatical to have fun with all of the above full time. He recently finished a four year stint at GiveWell and the Open Philanthropy Project helping the organizations grow and find the most beneficial uses for money.

Tsvi Benson-Tilsen studies mathematics at UC Berkeley and researches how to design safe artificial intelligence systems at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. He knows many riddles and can sometimes be found jumping, climbing, and/or wandering.