Core Team
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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.
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Lara Lincoln
Special Projects Manager (Full-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.
Non-Core Staff
BERI currently has fifteen employees embedded throughout our various collaboration programs:
Three at CHAI: ML Engineer Ian Baker, Executive Assistant J.P. Gonzales, and Intern Michael Jemison.
Four at CLTC: Senior Principal Policy Analyst Anthony Barrett and Researchers Nada Madkour, Deepika Raman, and Krystal Jackson.
One at DMIP: Executive Research Assistant Joseph Castellano.
Five at OCPL: Co-Directors Scott Singer and Kayla Blomquist, Head of Policy Programmes Karuna Nandkumar, Head of Events & Dialogues Elisabeth Siegel, and Program Associate Irena Petryk.
Two at SSPP: Web Developer Gary Menezes and Research Assistant Joseph Levine.
Board of Directors
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Elizabeth Cooper
PRESIDENT OF THE BOARD
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.
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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.
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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.