/ABOUT
Advancements in technology periodically redefine the boundaries of human freedom—transforming how we communicate, share information, and cooperate. The rise of artificial intelligence and cryptography—today’s great innovations—offer both the promise of greater human freedom and flourishing, and the peril of curtailment. One feared outcome is surveillance AI monopoly, writing over privacy in favor of centralized control. Cryptography offers a corrective, but alone doesn’t scale complex cooperation that underpins prosperity and innovation. My work supports a third way: leveraging social ties to define context, cryptography to secure communication, and AI to bridge cooperation.
My starting point is the design space between markets and democracy: communities. Most data relevant to cooperation arises in partial commons—in conversations between friends, families, and groups who share privacy expectations about their communication. Through research and small-scale experiments, my goal is to empower communities to securely establish shared context internally, so they can confidently deputize AIs to amplify their voices externally, scaling feedback and accountability into the larger networks they inhabit. This “community layer” both opens new frontiers for cooperation in markets, while deepening context for bridging and finding common ground in politics. If markets ideally provision private goods, and democracies public goods, then expressing the intermediate spectrum of partially common goods enriches both systems with social information—making them more adaptive with computational correctives to capture.
My interests mirror my past, which spans diverse fields: law, science, entrepreneurship, policy, and protocols. After earning a law degree at Stanford, I practiced corporate law at Skadden, Arps and then pivoted to biotech innovation, founding a women’s healthcare company that secured two FDA approvals. During the pandemic, I helped steward a bi-partisan bill provisioning tests amidst shortages, with the goal of encouraging cooperation between states. My curiosity then pivoted to consensus protocols and computational regulation, where I began making the case for community credentials as essential to decentralization, collusion-resistance, and bottom-up, networked cooperation.
Currently, I'm a Research Affiliate of Harvard’s Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation and advise a handful of experiments, nonprofits and startups. My collaborations are intersectional across law, economics, computer science, and meta-science with a shared aim: charting computational futures that advance human flourishing and freedom, through the strength of social connections.
