Leading voices in academia, tech and policy join us as Accelerator Fellows

As a new academic year begins, we are delighted to welcome four new Accelerator Fellows to the Accelerator Fellowship Programme within the Institute for Ethics in AI. 

Senior Accelerator Fellows: 

• Stuart Russell OBE, FRS is a Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, co-author of the standard textbook on artificial intelligence, and President of the International Association for Safe and Ethical AI (IASEAI). During the Fellowship, he will explore solutions to several philosophical problems arising in his long-term project to devise provably safe and beneficial AI systems.   
• Marietje Schaake is a Dutch politician and digital policy expert who served as a Member of the European Parliament from 2009-2019 and is now International Policy Director at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center. A leading voice at the intersection of technology, democracy and geopolitics, Marietje’s work focuses on the unchecked power of digital technology and its impact on democracy. During the Fellowship, Marietje will carry out research into possible policy options to counter the influence of tech companies as AI is deployed across the globe. 
• Jen Zhu is a technology founder, board member and investor. She is co-founder and CEO of Power Dynamics, a hardware solution provider that integrates battery energy storage systems, advanced immersion cooling for GPUs and thermal reutilisation to enable high-efficiency AI data centres and edge compute for local inference. During the Fellowship, Jen will undertake a research programme examining artificial intelligence as materially grounded in physical infrastructure – such as water, minerals and data centres – rather than treating cognition as purely abstract or computational. 

Accelerator Fellows 

• Isabelle Ferreras is a sociologist and political scientist working on corporate governance, labour, AI and democratic theory. She is Research Director of the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research in Brussels and professor extraordinaire at the University of Louvain. As a Fellow, Isabelle will work on a programme anchored in the view that the right to shape AI is the primary driver of meaningful work. 
• Zarinah Agnew is Research Director at the Collective Intelligence Project (CIP), where they build methods for measuring how well AI systems represent the people they are asked to speak for. Zarinah trained as a neuroscientist and now leads CIP's Global Dialogues programme, a cross-cultural deliberation dataset spanning more than eighty countries. As a Fellow, Zarinah will work on a project looking at where AI can be trusted to represent different sections of the population in exercises such as policy simulations. 

The Director of the Accelerator Fellowship Programme, Dr Caroline Emmer De Albuquerque Green, shared: 

“We are delighted to welcome this exceptional group of Fellows to the Accelerator Fellowship Programme. They bring a remarkable breadth of expertise and perspectives and the work they undertake as Fellows will make a vital contribution our mission to address some of the most pressing ethical challenges posed by AI.” 

Supported by funding from the Stephen A. Schwarzman Foundation, the Accelerator Fellowship Programme aims to make impactful contributions to AI regulation, industry practices and public awareness while fostering long-term alliances essential for addressing AI’s risks and opportunities. 

A bold vision lies at the heart of the programme: to ensure AI benefits everyone by addressing its ethical challenges, such as bias, privacy concerns, accountability and transparency. 

We encourage you to follow the work of our new and existing Accelerator Fellows by following us on LinkedIn and X and by keeping up to date with our regular events.