ESPR Staff
both past & present
Gavin Leech, PhD
ESPR Camp Lead
Gavin is a Visiting Scholar at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence within the University of Cambridge. He has a PhD in AI from Bristol, is a philosophy graduate and a compulsive blogger. Likes hills, singing, writing, barbells, writing, technical solutions to philosophical problems, and writing. Worked on COVID models somehow. Also co-runs Arb, a research consultancy.
Jan Kulveit, PhD
Executive Director, Instructor
Jan was a Research Fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford and now leads the Alignment of Complex Systems research group at the Center for Theoretical Study at Charles University in Prague.
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 returnspace exploration, astrobiology, AI, and worldbuildingformer NASA astronaut instructor
Education Lead at the Blue Marble Space Institute
Founded the Art of Inquiry online STEM program and Earthlings Hub nonprofit serving children displaced by war. She homeschooled all her children
Neel Nanda
Instructor
Neel runs the Google DeepMind mechanistic interpretability tea. He previously worked on interpretability research at Anthropic and as an independent researcher. He graduated from a maths degree at 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.
Damon Sasi
Instructor
Damon Sasi is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in Florida, 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.
Misha Yagudin
Guest Instructor
Misha runs Arb, a research consultancy. He studied ML and enjoyed math olympiads a lot. He co-runs the Samotsvety Forecasting group.
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.
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.
Kristie Nemcova
Operations
Kristie helped us organize ESPR logistics and many other projects as a remote contractor. She studied radiology and lives with her family in Prague.
ADVISORS
Yan Zhang, PhD
Senior Advisor
Yan Zhang, director of our sister camp SPARC, is an assistant professor in mathematics at San Jose State University after receiving his PhD from MIT. He wants to help people become more human and awesome. He has mentored students at the Mathematical Olympiad Summer Program (where he represented the U.S. at the International Mathematics Olympiad with a silver medal), RSI, and MIT-PRIMES. He received the Undergraduate Math Association’s Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Award for his postdoctoral position at UC Berkeley.