Future of Life Institute (FLI)

Research Scientist

• Conduct structured horizon-scanning for novel AI-enabled hazard classes, and develop methodologies for reasoning rigorously about threats that lack historical base rates or established scientific communities
• Investigate next-generation detection sciences, such as dynamic and adaptive pathogen surveillance, and analogous open-ended approaches for other emerging hazard modalities
• Pursue feasibility analyses on deep resilience and lifeline capacities engineered to function when conventional infrastructure, sunlight, or centralized coordination cannot be assumed
• Analyze biosphere-scale vulnerabilities, including geoengineering, synthetic microbes for terraforming or remediation, and nontraditional environmental toxicology arising from AI-enabled activity
• Identify and selectively advance defensive, stabilizing, and transparency-enhancing technologies whose differential acceleration favors humanity
• Develop scientific metaresearch on how evidence is generated, aggregated, and translated into action where conventional empirical feedback loops are weak
• Build scientific coordination capacity through standards, convenings, and cross-border working relationships, and equip frontline responders and community networks with usable decision support
• Co-author grant applications, build analytical tools that make catastrophic risks more legible, and translate findings for policymakers, technical audiences, and the public
• Collaborate across CARMA programs to integrate civil safety perspectives with broader risk assessment, governance, and technical safety workstreams

Senior Researcher, Civil Safety Sciences

Research Engineer

• Extend ontologies and knowledge graph schemas representing claims, evidence, argument structures, defeaters, and confidence
• Implement defeasible argumentation frameworks (e.g., ASPIC+, Dung-style, argumentation schemes) that capture both logical structure and vulnerability to rebuttal
• Operate and quality-control LLM-driven population pipelines, with cross-check scaffolds, provenance tracking, and human-in-the-loop curation
• Architect agent coordination patterns for multi-step research and population tasks, with robust error handling and graceful degradation
• Pre-harden argument structures by mapping the strongest counterarguments, steel-manned objections, and known defeaters
• Build export pipelines that translate structured argumentation into diverse communications formats across audiences and registers
• Maintain current awareness across AI safety, capabilities, and governance sufficient to know when new developments require graph updates, and to know where to find authoritative further detail
• Collaborate with communications staff and researchers to ensure outputs serve real persuasive needs

Senior Researcher, Civil Safety Sciences

AI Safety Argumentation Research Engineer