Our team

Judd is President of the AI Alignment Foundation. He is also the founder and CEO of AE Studio, an agile development, data science, and design company founded in 2016 with a commitment to fostering technologies that enhance human agency.

At AE Studio, Judd established a neurotech team to steer the industry toward more agency-enhancing technologies; in 2022 it won the Neural Latents Benchmark challenge, a prestigious competition in the BCI community that applies machine learning to neural signals. He also consulted on the software for the first FDA-approved invasive BCI, and received grants to develop additional open-source tools for the field.

With AI advancing rapidly and a heightened sense of urgency around its existential risks, Judd founded the AI Alignment Foundation to accelerate high impact alignment research.

Diogo is Chief Scientist at the AI Alignment Foundation. He has over a decade of experience leading research across AI alignment, neurotechnology, and applied ML.

At AIAF, he leads work on neglected alignment approaches, including deception reduction, model self-representation, interpretability, and neuroscience-inspired methods for alignment.

Before AIAF, he was a Harvard postdoctoral fellow, completed his PhD at UC Irvine’s Neurorehab Robotics Lab, and held industry roles in control systems and embedded engineering.

Melanie is Chief Technology Officer at the AI Alignment Foundation, where she leads research program delivery with a focus on rigor and industry pace.

Previously CTO of AE Studio, she led high-stakes research and engineering engagements for clients from early-stage startups to Fortune 10 companies and grew the team from 30 to 150.

She holds a B.S. in Biology from Yale.

Alicia brings 16 years of experience across entrepreneurship, nonprofits, philanthropy, tech, and impact investing. She has helped the Center for Humane Technology incubate its AI safety work, helped build and scale the AI & Democracy Foundation, and advises the Alaya Foundation, a nonprofit exploring what it means to be human in the age of AI. Previously, she co-founded a direct-to-consumer startup, served as founding COO of The Consciousness Foundation, and was President of Healing Advocacy Fund, a nonprofit supporting breakthrough mental health therapies.

James leads partnerships for the AI Alignment Foundation, where he works with people across industry, government, and academia to develop new research agendas.

He hosts the AI Alignment Podcast, interviewing researchers and technical leaders working to make advanced AI systems more interpretable and aligned.

Before AIAF, James was a Technical Program Manager in Modeling Engineering at Two Sigma, a $80B+ AUM quantitative hedge fund, and previously worked at Tesla, managing $25M in capital expenditure programs. He holds an MBA from Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business and an MA in Mathematics from Cambridge University.

Philip is VP of Operations at the AI Alignment Foundation, supporting the team across operations, grants, governance, and the day-to-day of keeping things running.

Lake brings over a decade of experience in public interest administration, finance, and legal operations, in addition to stints in the music and television industries. Lake has a B.A. in political science from Yale University, where he was President of the Roosevelt Institute's Center on Security and Foreign Policy.