Our Team
Giuseppe Dal Prá
Founder and CEO
Giuseppe is a transdisciplinary thinker, with writing on strategies for whole-society transitions towards a more resilient and flourishing civilisation. He completed a degree in History & Politics at Balliol College, University of Oxford, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
His research has covered how best to prepare against wicked problems and systemic risks, for example runaway climate change, using best practice in deliberation and other associated antifragile reforms. Strengthening democratic institutions to better handle conditions of crisis is one of his key focuses, as well as enhancing institutions’ scientific basis for addressing technical and long term risks.
He co-authored the ComplexCity semi-finalist entry (in the last 40 of 2700 entrants), developing an epistemic democratic platform proposal for citizen-led policy experiments, for the Global Challenges Foundation's New Shape Prize.
His engagement with over a hundred Effective Altruists at conferences in London, Oxford, Stockholm, Cambridge, Rotterdam and Berlin inspired the establishment of the Odyssean Institute to address areas many EAs agreed were neglected.
Jacob Haimes
AI Safety Lead
Jacob is a researcher with experience in machine learning, soft robotics, computational modeling, and healthcare information systems. He specializes in the effective dissemination of research, as well as promoting high quality and accessible science. At the Odyssean Institute, Jacob leads the AI Foresight Assembly project.
Jacob hosts two podcasts which focus on "AI" - Into AI Safety, and muckrAIkers. Both shows are produced by Kairos.fm, a podcast and media network he founded and runs in his free time. He works with Apart Research as a research project manager, and leads one group per cohort through BlueDot Impact's AI Alignment course. He received a BS in Mechanical Engineering and an MS in Computational Modeling from the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Timur Burkhanov
Research Assistant
Timur developed a strong interest in analysis of complex civilisational problems and understanding the nature of conflicts through his travels and teaching experiences from conflict-prone and developing regions, with a focus on the regions of MENA and Eurasia.
He holds a MSc. in cybersecurity from Ufa State Aviation Technical University and developed an interest in the application of machine learning and data science techniques for positive societal change, Timur has previously contributed to two Omdena projects, an AI tool for linguistic psychometric assessment of soft skills from meeting recordings, and building a chatbot for interview preparation using NLP.
Antonia Briel
Chief of Staff
Antonia is an operations strategist and researcher with expertise in political behaviour, crisis response, and institutional resilience. At the Odyssean Institute, she leads strategic operations, fundraising, and cross-disciplinary coordination, ensuring the Institute’s work on mitigating civilisational risks is executed effectively.
She holds a B.A. in Social Sciences from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where she specialised in democracy and transformation, quantitative text analysis, and causal inference. Her research focused on political agenda-setting after natural disasters and the predictive power of digital information flows. She has worked as a research assistant at Humboldt-Universität and the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW Berlin), contributing to projects in quantitative political research and data analysis.
Beyond research, Antonia has played key roles in high-impact organisations, contributing to strategy, logistics, community-building, and being the lead organiser for large-scale events. She managed teams of volunteers, and contributed to the development of tools for democratic discourse and deliberative decision-making. She has also facilitated peer support programs focused on mental resilience for professionals in demanding fields.
Her work integrates research, strategy, and execution, aligning deliberative decision-making with scalable solutions for addressing complex risks.
James Balzer
Foresight Lead
James is an Australian sustainable development practitioner, focused on the governance dimension of sustainable development, and how this can promote long-term, transformative changes in business, civil society and public sector organisations. He is a Next Generation Foresight Practitioner (NGFP) Fellow with the School of International Futures, where he is exploring improvements to anticipatory extreme heat governance practices in Singapore, Sydney, Jakarta and Manila. He is also leading the 'Cities and States Working Group' at the School of International Futures Pledge Network, which is embedding evaluation capacities for intergenerational fairness at city-level policy design and implementation. James is also leading the development of the World Economic Forum Future 100 Fellowship, and is a Visiting Lecturer at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. James is also the Vice-President of the Power For Change Institute and a Researcher at the Disruptive Futures Institute. He has a Master of Sustainable Development and a Master of Public Policy.
Richard Hames
Research Associate
Richard Hames is a political theorist and journalist. He is the co-author of Post-Internet Far Right (Dog Section, 2021) and The Rise of Ecofascism: Climate Change and the Far Right (Polity Press, 2022) and an editor of Crude Futures (New Models, 2023). He is a host of Novara FM and its Series Producer. He is currently working on a book project on collapse with Beau-Caprice Vetch.
Advisors
Dr. Luke Kemp
Luke is a Senior Research Associate at the Notre Dame Institute of Advanced Study, and a Research Affiliate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) and Darwin College at the University of Cambridge. His research focuses on understanding the long run history and future of extreme global risks. Luke has advised the WHO and multiple international institutions, and his work has been covered by media outlets such as the BBC, New York Times, and the New Yorker.
He holds both a Doctorate in International Relations and a Bachelor of Interdisciplinary Studies with first class honours from the Australian National University (ANU). His first book on the deep history and future of societal collapse (Goliath’s Curse) will be published with Penguin in 2025.
Dr. Bonnie Wintle
Bonnie has an interdisciplinary background. In her Bachelor of Science (Hons), she studied plant ecology, philosophy of science and geography. Her PhD was on improving environmental judgements and decision making, with the environmental science group at the University of Melbourne. Her postdoctoral work was on horizon scanning for biodiversity conservation (University of Melbourne) and existential risks (CSER, University of Cambridge). Now working in the area of ‘metascience’ (with MetaMelb), Bonnie develops structured methods for eliciting and aggregating quantitative and qualitative judgements from groups of experts, to support better decision and policy making.
Her interests include:
-
Meta-research
-
Expert Judgement
-
Environmental Decision Making
-
Horizon Scanning
Bjørn Bedsted
Bjørn Bedsted is the International Director at Democracy x (formerly the Danish Board of Technology) where he works for the advancement of deliberative democracy; the implementation of public engagement in research and innovation; improvement of the Science for Policy infrastructure; and the democratization of the use of knowledge in decision making.
Bjørn has led participatory Technology Assessments of new technologies and their potential to contribute to address societal challenges. He has designed and implemented citizen participation methods from the local to the global level, e.g. as the Global Coordinator of the World Wide Views projects and as part of the team behind the Conference on the Future of Europe and the EC Citizens Panels
Dr. Mark Fabian
Mark Fabian is assistant professor of public policy at the University of Warwick, and an affiliate fellow at the Bennett Institute for Public Policy in the University of Cambridge. He was previously a Fulbright postdoctoral scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington DC. His studies wellbeing from an interdisciplinary perspective, with a focus on policy applications.
His most recent book, A Theory of Subjective Wellbeing, was published by Oxford University Press in 2022 as part of their philosophy, politics, and economics series. His journal articles have appeared in top journals across multiple fields, including Perspectives on Psychological Science, European Journal for the Philosophy of Science, and the Journal of European Public Policy.
Professor Peter Turchin
Peter Turchin is a complexity scientist who works in the field of historical social science that he and his colleagues call Cliodynamics. His research interests lie at the intersection of social and cultural evolution, historical macrosociology, economic history and cliometrics, mathematical modelling of long-term social processes, and the construction and analysis of historical databases. Currently he investigates a set of broad and interrelated questions: How do human societies evolve? In particular, what processes explain the evolution of ultrasociality—our capacity to cooperate in huge anonymous societies of millions? What processes are responsible for the resilience of complex societies to external and internal shocks? What causes political communities to cohere and what causes them to fall apart? Currently his main research effort is directing the Seshat Databank project (and its offshoot, CrisisDB) which builds and analyses a massive historical database that enables us to empirically test predictions from theories attempting to explain why and how complex human societies evolved, and why they periodically experience political breakdown.
Turchin has published >200 articles in peer-reviewed journals that include Nature, Science, and PNAS. His publications are frequently cited and in 2004 he was designated as “Highly cited researcher” by ISIHighlyCited.com. In 2021 he was elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Turchin has authored ten books. His most recent books are End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration (2023) and The Great Holocene Transformation (forthcoming).
Dr. Mark Workman
Mark Workman is a specialist in Strategic Foresight. He uses mixed methods to develop insights about risks and opportunities in different possible futures with a specific application to the net zero transition.
He is a Coastal Engineer (University of Southampton), Military (Queens Gurkha Engineers) and Business Leader (Medical and Security Consultancy), Environmental Economist, Academic (Imperial College London and Oxford University) and Strategist by training. He has undertaken military tours, led extreme and high-risk expeditions all over the world and run multi-million-dollar business units. He has two military awards for leadership.
Dr. Roger Cremades
Asst. Prof. Dr. Roger Cremades is a social-ecological complexity economist. Roger has more than 10 years of experience in the complex socio-economic interactions of climate change in China, India, the Americas, and several European regions. He coordinated European research and co-production projects on climate change adaptation (e.g. CLISWELN).
His work on the intersection of complex systems, global change, and economics appeared in top journal like PNAS, Ecological Economics, Nature Climate Change, Nature Food, and Nature Geoscience, i.a.. Roger has been twice elected member of the Council of the Complex Systems Society (2022-2025, and 2019-2022), elected Executive Board Member of CoMSES.net (2024-2026), and also co-chaired the Development Team of the Finance and Economics Knowledge-Action Network of Future Earth (2020-2022).
Roger is known for applying complex systems methods such as networks, cellular automata, AI, or adaptive cycles, thus producing innovative work about socio-economic tipping points, the social feasibility of large-scale floating settlements, the dynamics of social norms, the sustainability frontiers of cities, the economics of the water-energy-land nexus, machine learning predictions in the use of natural resources, catastrophic risk, climate-risk insurances, and green investments, to mention a few. Roger likes good coffee, good food, spices, and multiple fermentation processes. A few times every winter, Roger either breaks the ice in a frozen lake and jumps into the water, or does things of the sort on freezing torrents and seas.
Trustees
Paul Ingram
Paul has been involved in efforts to improve methods of deliberative democracy for many years, since being an Oxford City Councillor (1996-2002) and co-Leader of the Council in a shared Administration (2000-02).
He has also been the Executive Director of the registered charity British American Security Information Council (www.basicint.org) developing public education around the issue of nuclear deterrence and disarmament (2007-19).
BASIC received funding for this work from a number of charities and governments including the FCDO.
Dr. Daniel Hoyer
Dr. Daniel Hoyer is a computational historian and complexity scientist. He currently serves as Senior Research Associate & Managing Director for Seshat: Global History Databank, Research Scientist with the SocialAI Research Group, and Part Time Professor, George Brown College.
He holds a PhD from New York University, where he studied economic and social development in the high Roman Empire. Since 2014 he has been working alongside Prof. Peter Turchin as part of the Seshat Databank project, a multidisciplinary project examining long-run social dynamics by combining qualitative and empirical information about the past with advanced quantitative analysis and computer modelling.
His research seeks to understand the root causes of and limiting factors to societal development and resilience. In particular, he is interested in understanding societal responses to shifting ecological, social, and economic contexts that determine well-being outcomes in the past, as well as how this understanding may shed light on critical social pressures today.
He has written or edited several books, most recently the Seshat History of the Axial Age with Jenny Reddish and Figuring Out the Past with Peter Turchin. He has co-authored numerous articles, including pieces published in PNAS, Science Advances, and Nature: Scientific Reports. His work has been featured in several podcasts, radio shows, and news articles, such as the History Hits podcast and interviews in Nature, The Guardian, and New Scientist.
Dr. Jan Kwakkel
Dr. Jan Kwakkel is a full professor of Decision Making under Deep Uncertainty at Delft University of Technology in the public policy analysis group at the faculty of Technology, Policy and Management.
His research focusses on the development and testing of model-based methods for enabling public deliberation and decision making under uncertainty. He is a founding member and current president of the society for decision making under deep uncertainty.
He has received several grants from the Dutch national science foundation and has applied his research in various domains including flood risk management, the net zero transition, health, and safety, and security.
Dr. Catherine Rhodes
Catherine is Head of Operations and Engagement for SPRITE+ (the Security, Privacy, Identity and Trust Engagement NetworkPlus) at the University of Manchester. She was previously Executive Director of the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, and retains a research affiliation there. In the context of addressing global risk, Catherine’s work broadly focuses on understanding the intersection and combination of risk stemming from technologies and risk stemming from governance (or lack of it).
She has particular expertise in the international governance of biotechnology, biosecurity and broader biological risk management – as well as the lessons that can be drawn from these areas for the wider governance of global catastrophic risks. Catherine has an academic background in international relations but has engaged in extensive interdisciplinary work. Her PhD was funded as part of the Project on Strengthening the Biological Weapons Convention at the Bradford Disarmament Research Centre, and Catherine retains a strong interest in international actions to prevent misuse of science. Catherine has participated in several horizon scanning exercises relating to bioengineering, synthetic biology, global health, and dual-use research of concern.