Team

Joel Christoph

CEO

Economist and AI-governance researcher focused on mechanism design, compute governance, and the institutional architecture of frontier-AI oversight. Sets Explore’s strategic direction across research partnerships and international policy.

• ERIA School of Government Fellow; Technology and Human Rights Fellow, Harvard Kennedy School Carr-Ryan Center
• Prior policy research: World Bank, Future of Life Institute; GovAI summer fellow; co-founder, Equiano Institute and 10Billion.org
• Recent work: Risk-Weighted Compute Permit Markets under Imperfect Monitoring; writing on the EU AI Act and Brussels Effect

Jonas Kgomo

Chief Technical Officer

Engineer building the computational layer for policy analysis — simulation, metascience retrieval, and systems that treat uncertainty and model drift as first-class concerns. Leads Explore’s technical roadmap.

• Founder, Equiano Institute; background in mathematics (Istanbul) and computer science (Sussex); research into human-style theorem proving at Cambridge
• Co-author, Case Studies of AI Policy Development in Africa (Cambridge Data & Policy, 2024)
• Co-author with Zekai Song, AI4Policy: AI-Enabled Scenario Planning for Policy-Making in the Age of AI

Julia Park

Research — φιλόσοφος

Neuroscience and political science. Studies evidence-based deliberation, RLHF hedging, and civic information infrastructure — the epistemic layer between citizens and institutions. Book in progress: Policymaking for Realists.

• Study: Syntactic complexity and alignment-induced hedging in RLHF-tuned language models (Universal Dependencies)
• Study: Evidence-based political deliberation — RAG for theoretical contestation in social science
• Study: Polarization, Misinformation, and the Case for Civic Information Infrastructure

Caleb Maresca

Economic Officer

Quantitative economist working on causal machine learning, asset pricing, and the macroeconomics of transformative AI. Supplies the economic structure and causal assumptions underneath Explore’s simulations.

• PhD in Economics, NYU; research scientist at Upstart
• AGI Could Lower Interest Rates — heterogeneous-agent asset-pricing under labour automation
• Strategic Wealth Accumulation Under Transformative AI Expectations; agent-based work on prediction markets and long-horizon events

Vinayak Kalra

Integrated Deployment Policy

Works at the translation layer between research and deployable policy — technology strategy, foresight, and the institutional constraints that decide whether a capability becomes a usable intervention.

• Research Associate, Explore Policy — integrated deployment, foresight analysis, and emerging-technology economic policy
• Johns Hopkins SAIS; AI Governance and Literacy Fellow, Nuelor AI; Research Fellow, Information Society Law Center

Zekai Song

Research

Scenario planning, wargaming epistemology, and AI-assisted policy reasoning. Focuses on treating generative outputs as uncertain signals — with retrieval for counter-evidence and mechanisms to retract inconsistent claims.

• Co-author with Jonas Kgomo, AI4Policy: AI-Enabled Scenario Planning for Policy-Making in the Age of AI
• Architecture interests: Bayesian scenario generation, counter-evidence retrieval, policy generation with rollback under audit

Paul Ingram

Advisor, Strategic Deterrence

Guides ethical deployment with decades of experience in strategic deterrence and multilateral governance.