Meet Our Global Team 

Ash is our Founder and CEO, with a background as an AI entrepreneur, policymaker, educator and investor. He is Treasurer at Rethink Priorities, and a mentor at Salzburg Global Fellowship. He was formerly Chief Economist at the Royal Society of Arts, where he led work on economic change and co-founded the Forum for Ethical AI with DeepMind.

He is the author of The Moral Marketplace (UB Press, 2018) as well as more than thirty publications on policy and tech for good, and writes and broadcasts widely. He is based between London, Berlin, and the Bay Area.

Sam is an Electric Sheep Associate, Mentor and Technical Guru. He facilitates the Futurekind fellowship and offers mentorship across the field to code-based projects. As founder of OpenPaws he is a key delivery partner for Electric Sheep, providing technical architecture and oversight for the Code for Compassion series.

Dr Bárbara Buril is a research and strategy consultant with a PhD in Philosophy and a background in journalism. She supports high-impact projects—across nonprofits and businesses—in turning complex ideas into clear, actionable strategies. Previously, she worked at Animal Think Tank, where she led research on social movement theory and cultural change to advance animal freedom in the UK.

Fluent in Portuguese, English, French, and Spanish, Bárbara has been published in academic journals and mainstream media and is also a published author. She is especially passionate about supporting people to shape the future of artificial intelligence in ways that promote the wellbeing of both animals and humans—through bold, thoughtful, and effective strategies for the greater good.

Gizem took a PhD in Anthropology at Rice University. Her dissertation research explored the live animal trade as a site that intensifies the translations between ‘animal’ and capital, through an investigation of Turkey’s live cattle imports. Her areas of interest are critical animal studies, human–nonhuman animal relations, veterinary anthropology, economic anthropology, and STS.

She enjoys combining my experiences in social sciences and web development and design, and acquired front-end web development skills through the Re:Coded Frontend Web Development Bootcamp.

Matt is founder and president of MTCC—a boutique consulting firm specializing in engineering design and implementation for the food & beverage industry. With a proven track record of scaling iconic plant-based brands like Impossible Burger, Kite Hill cheese, Ripple Milk, and Eat JUST mayo, Matt has helped start-ups successfully navigate the journey from pre-seed to commercialization.

Aditya is the wild animal suffering outreach coordinator for Animal Ethics. He works in grass-roots animal activism with a variety of organisations. He is studying Animal Protection Law at the National Legal Studies Research Institute in India.

Indra serves in local politics for the Dutch Party for the Animals, in the Water Authority (a Dutch layer of government), his City Council and in the Province before, together covering all layers of Dutch local politics, focusing in particular on topics that relate to his background. His study background spans systems biology - including evolutionary theory, combined with a strong interest in Dennettian philosophy - and risk management or actuarial science (i.e. insurance mathematics) and related fields, i.e. econometrics, operations research and mathematical economics. He co-founded Effective Altruism Tilburg, which included an effective animal advocacy group discussing Tobias Leenaert’s book How to Create a Vegan World as well as a fellowship on Global Mental Health, and the Tilburg AI Safety Initiative with a unique focus on the governance of AI systems. The wider community and before that his alma mater, rooted in the tutorial system, provided ample opportunities to practice facilitation, which he can now apply in our Futurekind fellowship. The future interplay between facts and values, and what our and artificial intelligence’s role therein should be and is, is one of his favourite topics for reflection.

Damin is a longtime animal advocate who is passionate about leveraging data to further animal welfare. He is particularly interested in improving policy interventions that help animals at scale, optimizing resource allocation to the most effective animal charities, and in the emerging field of wild animal welfare.

Sean is an advocate for effective altruism with a background in AI safety research and animal advocacy. He has worked on interpretability and causal inference for large language models at the University of Chicago, and previously supported regulatory work at the Good Food Institute. He is pursuing a PhD in Statistics at UC Berkeley.