Welcome to ERA
ERA is a global talent and research organisation working to help ensure the transition to advanced AI is safe. We develop exceptional researchers, advance high-priority research and build institutions across frontier AI safety, security and biosecurity. We do this by:
Supporting ambitious research across our focus areas (Technical AI Safety, AI Governance, Technical AI Governance, AI Security, Biosecurity) and adjacent fields, providing researchers with funding, expert mentorship and dedicated research management support.
Developing people and research communities which can make sustained contributions to frontier AI safety & biosecurity, and helping ERA alumni move into high-impact roles across research, policy, industry and entrepreneurship.
Building and strengthening institutions, including by piloting new programmes, research collaborations and supporting organisations that address important gaps in the ecosystem.
Partnering across the field with universities, research institutes, governments and frontier AI organisations to connect expertise, accelerate promising work and help research translate into real-world impact.
Our Mission
Advanced AI could be one of the most consequential technologies of this century. Ensuring that its development goes well will require progress across technical alignment & control strategies for increasingly capable AI systems, as well as the institutions, safeguards and technical infrastructure that shape how they are built and deployed.
ERA exists to help build the research capacity needed for that transition. We identify important and neglected problems, bring together researchers with the expertise to work on them, and create programmes and institutions that allow promising work to develop.
Our work spans Technical AI Safety, AI Governance, Technical AI Governance, AI Security and AI×Biosecurity. Across these areas, we are particularly interested in problems where additional research, talent or institutional capacity could substantially improve our ability to understand, control and govern increasingly capable AI systems. Our alumni now lead work at RAND, the UK AI Security Institute, and other key institutions actively shaping the future of AI.
Beyond our fellowship programmes, we are cultivating a robust research ecosystem and building strong infrastructure to ensure that advanced AI systems remain safe, beneficial, and aligned with humanity’s best interests.
Over 5+ years, we have built a portfolio of programmes around some of the most important emerging fields for mitigating risks from frontier technologies. We accelerate talent, advance research, and strengthen the institutions for navigating the transition to a world with transformative AI via our events & programmes portfolio.
The people behind ERA
Research managers
15 people
ERA:AI
07 RMs
Technical AI Safety
David Williams-King
David combines technical AI safety research with public communication. He has conducted research at Mila, worked with David Krueger and Yoshua Bengio, and previously led a cybersecurity insurance startup as founding CTO. He holds a PhD in cybersecurity from Columbia University.
Technical AI Safety
Meeri Kuoppala
Meeri's background is in AI safety research and mathematics. She's worked on AI safety strategy at Convergence Analysis and on technical AI safety research through the Dovetail Research fellowship. She completed a BSc in mathematics in one year at the University of Helsinki.
Technical AI Governance
Jacob Davies
Jacob works across technical AI safety and governance. A former ERA fellow, his research has covered chain-of-thought monitorability, transparency disclosures and persona-dependent steering. He consults for the Centre for Long-Term Resilience’s Loss of Control Observatory and holds an MSc in NLP from Edinburgh.
Technical AI Governance
Sean Fillingham
Sean studies hazard analysis and risk modelling for frontier AI, applying systems frameworks including STPA and CAST to loss-of-control risks. He has also red-teamed AI safety cases using Assurance 2.0 and CAE. Before AI safety, he spent a decade in astrophysics and served in the US Army.
AI Governance
Jacob Schaal
Jacob is an AI governance researcher and economist focused on AI’s labour-market impacts. His work has covered information-sharing under UK competition law, AI-enabled disinformation and CBRN risks, EU AI Act implementation and technical standards. He holds an MSc in Economics from the LSE.
AI Governance
Christina Krawec
Christina is an international security professional specialising in nuclear nonproliferation, safeguards, AI policy and space. She founded Earthnote, an open-source and satellite-imagery consultancy, after roles at the International Atomic Energy Agency, the US Department of Defense and Google.
AI Governance
Jake Charnock
Jake researches AI risk management and frontier-company policy. He has been both a MATS research fellow and an ERA fellow, with research accepted at FAccT and ICML TAIGR. He holds an MPhil in Ethics of AI, Data and Algorithms from Cambridge.
FASR
06 RMs
Research Manager
Anjay Friedman
Anjay is a researcher at RAND focused on technical AI policy and security. His work spans securing strategically important AI algorithmic insights, emergency preparedness for AI loss-of-control incidents and technical mechanisms for verifying AI datacentre use.
Research Manager
Jackson Dean
Jackson is a robotics engineer with experience across embedded systems, manufacturing and mechanical design. At FASR, he supports research and engineering projects in frontier AI security and hardware-enabled verification.
Research Manager
Will Fowler
Will is a technical AI governance researcher building data-centre tools for verifying compliance with future AI agreements. At FASR, he helps residents scope hardware-verification projects.
Research Manager
Stephanie Itimi
Stephanie is a cybersecurity and AI governance professional with over 10 years of experience across research, non-profits, and the public sector. Her work spans frontier AI security, governance, and organisational risk. She currently is a Seasonal Fellow at GovAI, and is a Cybersecurity PhD researcher at Royal Holloway. Stephanie previously held roles at Age UK, Home Office, the NCSC Charity Trust Group, and founded Seidea CIC.
Research Manager
Jakub Kryś
Jakub is a SaferAI research scientist working on quantitative AI risk management, with experience spanning adversarial machine learning, cybersecurity and compute governance. He holds a PhD in particle physics from Durham University.
Research Manager
Zac Richardson
Zac works across the Singapore AI Safety Hub’s research streams as Special Projects Manager. He was previously a GovAI fellow and a Program Specialist at 80,000 Hours.
AI×Bio
03 RMs
Research Manager
Dr. Christopher Stamper
Chris is an independent biosecurity researcher studying synthetic mirror-life risks and non-canonical amino acids in protein diffusion models. He holds a PhD in Immunology from the University of Chicago and has worked across bioinformatics, machine learning and LLM benchmarking for laboratory tasks.
Research Manager
Dr. Mila Noor
Mila is a policy analyst researching emerging technologies and AI×Bio risk mitigation. A former Cambridge Bye-Fellow and Gates Scholar, she holds a PhD in Immunology and Infectious Diseases and works on pandemic preparedness, biosecurity policy and catastrophic biological risk reduction.
Research Manager
Lee Wall
Lee is a data scientist and modeller whose work has included assessing CBRNE threats. His AI×Bio research examines tamper-resistant safeguards for open-weight biological models and whether they can meaningfully reduce catastrophic misuse.
Programmes team
10 people
Founder
Nandini Shiralkar
Nandini founded ERA in 2021 while studying Engineering at Cambridge. She holds an MEng from Cambridge, graduating with a triple specialisation across Information Engineering, Biomedical Engineering & Control Engineering. She has helped grow ERA from a single fellowship into a portfolio of research programmes across Technical AI Safety, AI Governance, Technical AI Governance, frontier AI security and AI×Biosecurity.
Programme Director
Jonathan Dannevig
Jonathan is an engineer and economist with a Harvard MBA and fifteen years of experience across consulting, entrepreneurship and international policy. Before ERA, he worked at BCG, founded two companies and served as a policy officer at the United Nations.
AIx Programme Manager
Patrick Peel
Patrick works with ERA’s programmes team. His recent research has examined governance instruments and policy convergence for general-purpose AI across non-frontier jurisdictions.
Hardware Strategy Lead
Yannick Mühlhäuser
Yannick is a policy researcher at the Future of Life Institute and a research affiliate at the Oxford Martin AI Governance Initiative and its Hardware AI Governance Lab. His work focuses on compute governance and verification for international AI agreements, including hardware-enabled governance mechanisms and methods for detecting hidden compute infrastructure.
Senior Programme Associate
Genevieve Gaul
Genevieve works across long-term programme planning, workshop facilitation and participant support. She first joined ERA as Community Health Lead. Previously, she designed and organised a university student-development programme and studied Literature at Durham University.
Senior Operations Associate
Ruqaiya Takreem
Ruqaiya has a background in law, human rights and governance and is a licensed advocate in India. Her interests include the legal alignment of AI and risks from authoritarian misuse. Beyond ERA, she builds talent pipelines for Global South researchers entering high-impact careers.
Programme Associate
Oscar Lloyd
Oscar is a philosopher studying AI Ethics at Cambridge, with a background in ethics and moral cognition from Columbia University. Their work focuses on risks from automated decision-making and the metaethical questions raised by decision-making with language models.
Community Associate
Grace Reuben
Grace is the founder and host of The AI Girls Club, a London-based platform making AI safety, risk and regulation accessible to non-technical women through podcasts, social content and live events. At ERA, she supports the community as Community Associate.
Events Associate
Jack May
Jack studied Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh with a scholarship study abroad at UC Berkeley and a dissertation examining ethical AI through associative learning. He recently pivoted from financial services to AI Safety and has joined ERA as an Events Associate to support the delivery of key events like the Technical Governance Forum. Beyond ERA, he works part-time as an AI Governance Consultant at Rayol, and is a fellow at Youth for Responsible AI in their Policy track.
Office Manager
Libby Simmons
Libby is an MPhil student in Ethics of AI, Data and Algorithms at the University of Cambridge, with a background in technology ethics and moral philosophy and experience as an AI analyst. Her interests include predictive AI, surveillance technology, fairness metrics and AI governance.
Previous Research Managers at ERA: Kristina Fort, Usman Anwar, Cameron Tice, Peter Gebauer, Richard Moulange, Yulu Niki Pi, Fazl Barez, Rudolf Laine, Moritz von Knebel, Tilman Räuker, Oscar Delaney, Gideon Futerman, Irina Gueorguiev, Joël Christoph, Will Aldred, Jaime Bernardi, Herbie Bradley, and Dewi Erwan.
The ERA Fellowship has run every summer since 2021. Thus far, we have supported 200+ researchers from 30+ countries through our programmes, spanning projects related to AI safety, biosecurity, nuclear security, and extreme climate change mitigation.
In 2024, we shifted our focus to AI safety and governance research. Our alumni have used their time and experience at ERA to secure positions in technical AI safety and policy within governments, AI research centres and influential think tanks.
Our History
