ESPR Staff
Gavin Leech, PhD
ESPR camp lead
Gavin runs Arb, a research consultancy, and is a fellow at Cosmos. He recently wrote a book on AI with Dwarkesh Patel. He has a PhD in AI from the University of Bristol and 1100 book reviews on Goodreads. He likes hills, singing, writing, barbells, writing, technical solutions to philosophical problems, and writing.
Jan Kulveit, PhD
Executive Director, Instructor
Jan leads the Alignment of Complex Systems research group at Charles University in Prague. Previously he was a fellow at FHI, University of Oxford. His research is centered on making AI aligned with human interests and focuses among others on the active inference framework or hierarchical agency. In his free time, he enjoys mountain hiking and drinking good tea.
Julia Brodsky
Instructor
Principal Risk Manager on the 2025 NASA Mars sample return. Former astronaut instructor. Education lead at the Blue Marble Space Institute. Founded Earthlings Hub, a nonprofit serving children displaced by war. She also homeschooled her three children.
Neel Nanda
Instructor
Neel runs the Google DeepMind mechanistic interpretability team. He graduated from Cambridge in 2020. He's excited about understanding himself and the world, making good educational materials (especially for interpretability), blogging and optimising things.
Mihaly Barasz
Instructor
Mihaly was a software engineer at Google and a former perfect scorer on the International Mathematical Olympiad. Since then, tried his hand at bunch of random things like algorithmic trading and blockchain analysis/hacking and now runs a small consulting company with a friend in Zurich. Mihaly is interested in functional languages, formal proof systems, rock climbing, and pigeons.
Anicka Dolezalova, PhD
Instructor
Half-nomadic math postdoc at the Czech Academy of Sciences. Big fan of balance-and-trust sports like dancing, acrobatics, climbing or wild water canoeing. Used to organize math and art camps.
Damon Sasi
Instructor
Damon Sasi is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, where he works as a Youth and Family therapist by day and writes Pokemon rational fiction by night. He's a strong believer in both the power of stories as a catalyst for growth, and the power of rationality to improve therapeutic practices, and is working to combine all three in as many ways as possible.
Elizabeth Garret
Instructor
Elizabeth is an aspiring dicentenarian and a former unschooler. She worked as a preschool teacher in Spain, market researcher for a biotech startup, and as an instructor, curriculum developer, and project manager at the Center for Applied Rationality.
Stag Lynn
Instructor
Stag is an independent researcher looking into some wacky aspects of human behavior and big fan of stories and narratives. A youth filled with enthusiasm for late-night conversations and a desire to map the human mind for practical purposes rather than deeper understanding. He is an ESPR 2016 alumnus and ESPR 2017-2021 staff.
Tomas Gavenciak, PhD
Instructor
Tomáš is a researcher at Charles University Prague, interested in value learning and representation, game theory and bounded rationality. He used to work in CS theory (algorithms and complexity, graphs, game theory, genomics, etc.). He enjoys good tea, board games, introspection, and green scenes outside his window.
Anna Gajdova
Instructor
Anna studied Mathematics for 6 years and gradually realized she enjoys learning maths only outside the university. Besides ESPR, she helps run a program focused on interdisciplinary research focused on making AI systems beneficial. She enjoys the company of people, dogs, and books.
ADVISORS
Yan Zhang, PhD
Senior Advisor
Yan Zhang directs our sister camp SPARC. He is an assistant professor in mathematics at San Jose State University after a PhD from MIT. He wants to help people become more human and awesome. He has mentored students at the Mathematical Olympiad Summer Program, RSI, and MIT-PRIMES. He received the Undergraduate Math Association’s Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Award.