Core Team

  • Elizabeth Cooper

    Executive Director (Full-Time)

    Elizabeth joined BERI in February 2023 to support operations and grow new collaborations. She is currently a visiting researcher at the Center for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge. In her previous roles, she worked as a Chief of Staff at various tech start-ups, including Corvid Technologies. She holds a B.A. in Economics and Peace, War, and Defense from the University of North Carolina. In her free time, she is an avid hiker, scuba diver, and home chef.

  • Lara Lincoln

    Special Projects Manager (Part-Time)

    Lara joined BERI in February 2025 to support operations. She currently works in web, data, and communications at Duke University. Her previous roles were primarily focused on academic program management at the Institute for Defense & Business and the Warrior-Scholar Project. She holds a B.A. in Psychology from the University of North Carolina, where she also served as a Chancellor’s Fellow following her graduation. She is also a founder and board member of the Carolina Veterans Alumni Network. Her passions include books, board games, and body art.

  • Andrew Critch

    President & Founder (~1 hour/month)

    Andrew is CEO and Co-founder of Encultured. Immediately prior to Encultured, Andrew spent 5 years working as a full-time research scientist at UC Berkeley, within the Center for Human-Compatible AI (CHAI), where he retains a part-time appointment. Andrew also established the Survival and Flourishing Fund and Survival and Flourishing Projects with the support of philanthropist Jaan Tallinn. In 2013, Andrew earned his Ph.D. in mathematics at UC Berkeley studying applications of algebraic geometry to machine learning models. During that time, he cofounded the Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR) and the Summer Program on Applied Rationality and Cognition (SPARC). He has also worked as an algorithmic stock trader at Jane Street’s New York City office (2014-2015), and as a Research Fellow at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (2015-2017).

Non-Core Staff

BERI currently has fifteen employees embedded throughout our various collaboration programs:

Board of Directors

  • Andrew Critch

    CHAIR OF THE BOARD

    Andrew is CEO and Co-founder of Encultured. Immediately prior to Encultured, Andrew spent 5 years working as a full-time research scientist at UC Berkeley, within the Center for Human-Compatible AI (CHAI), where he retains a part-time appointment. Andrew also established the Survival and Flourishing Fund and Survival and Flourishing Projects with the support of philanthropist Jaan Tallinn. In 2013, Andrew earned his Ph.D. in mathematics at UC Berkeley studying applications of algebraic geometry to machine learning models. During that time, he cofounded the Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR) and the Summer Program on Applied Rationality and Cognition (SPARC). He has also worked as an algorithmic stock trader at Jane Street’s New York City office (2014-2015), and as a Research Fellow at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (2015-2017).

  • Jess Reidel

    TREASURER

    Jess is a physicist (senior research scientist) in the Physics & Informatics Lab at NTT research in Sunnyvale, CA. He specializes in quantum information, decoherence, and the quantum-classical transition. In particular, he has worked on dark-matter direct detection with matter interferometers and on rigorous definitions for wavefunction branches on a many-body lattice. Jess was previously a visiting scholar at the Center for Human-compatible Artificial Intelligence at the University of California, Berkeley, and held postdoctoral research positions at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and at IBM Research. He earned a Bachelor's in physics from Princeton in 2007 and a PhD in Physics from UC Santa Barbara in 2012, advised by Wojciech Zurek at Los Alamos National Lab. His website is jessriedel.com.

  • Sawyer Bernath

    SECRETARY AND DIRECTOR

    Sawyer currently works as the Operations Director at Tarbell. He is Treasurer of the Board at FAR AI and a board member at SecureBio. He previously worked as the Executive Director of BERI until November 2024. Prior to joining BERI in 2019, Sawyer was a Production Manager at Research Electro Optics (now Excelitas Boulder) and Head of Production at Modular Robotics. He has a B.S. in physics from Tufts University.