Meet the team
Founders
Benjamin Todd
CEO and co-founder
Ben managed 80,000 Hours while it grew from a lecture, to a student society, to the organisation it is today. Before 80,000 Hours, he was the first undergraduate to intern as an analyst at a top investment fund. He has a 1st from Oxford in Physics and Philosophy, has published in Climate Physics, once kick-boxed for Oxford, and speaks Chinese, badly.
Prof. Will MacAskill
Co-founder and President
In 2009, Will co-founded Giving What We Can, a leading charity evaluator that has raised over $400m in pledged donations to effective charities and advised the UK government, World Bank, Oxfam among others. In 2011, he co-founded 80,000 Hours with Ben. Currently an Associate Professor of moral philosophy at Oxford, Will has pledged to give over half his income to charity, and is the author of Doing Good Better.
Core team
Niel Bowerman
AI policy specialist
Niel was a co-founder of the Centre for Effective Altruism and previously served as Assistant Director at the University of Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute. He holds a PhD in physics from Oxford and has six years of experience in climate advocacy, during which he served on Barack Obama’s 2008 Environment Policy Team and worked as an advisor to the President of the Maldives.
Roman Duda
Software Engineer & Systems Analyst
Roman did a fully-funded Masters in Philosophy at Oxford, during which he also consulted for a major energy company on their business strategy, whilst also studying Mandarin Chinese. With a strong interest in Quantified Self, he has worked at the start-ups Memrise and Self Spark.
Peter Hartree
Tech Lead & Web Product Manager
Peter has been making things for the web for 15 years. His side projects include Inbox When Ready, a Chrome extension with thousands of weekly users. He graduated with 1st class degree in Philosophy, receiving two awards for academic achievement and a bursary from the Philosophical Quarterly.
Michelle Hutchinson
Head of Advising
Michelle holds a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Oxford, where her thesis was on global priorities research. While completing that, she did the operational set-up of the Centre for Effective Altruism and then became Executive Director of Giving What We Can. She came to us fresh from setting up the Global Priorities Institute at Oxford.
Habiba Islam
Advisor
Habiba previously served as the Senior Administrator for the Future of Humanity Institute and the Global Priorities Institute at Oxford. Before that she qualified as a barrister and worked in management consulting specialising in operations for public and third sector clients.
Arden Koehler
Researcher
Before coming to 80,000 Hours, Arden was at New York University getting a PhD in philosophy, with a specialisation in ethics and attitudes toward time.
Howie Lempel
Strategy Advisor
Howie previously worked on global catastrophic risks as a program officer at the Open Philanthropy Project. Before that, he went to Yale Law for two years, where he spent his summers as a public defender in Louisiana and suing prisons with poor conditions at the ACLU. He left Yale to join the Open Philanthropy Project while it was being incubated at GiveWell. Howie has also worked on white collar crime at the Manhattan DA’s office and on U.S. economic policy as a research assistant at the Brookings Institution. As an undergraduate, Howie studied mathematical economics and interdisciplinary social studies at Wesleyan University, a small liberal arts college in Connecticut.
Brenton Mayer
Head of Internal Systems
Brenton came to 80,000 Hours after practicing clinical medicine in Australia. He co-founded the Run to Better Days and Effective Altruism Australia, non-profits promoting effective development aid for people living in extreme poverty. He once represented his city in table tennis and takes the sport way too seriously.
Peter McIntyre
Head of Recruiting
After pursuing clinical medicine, Peter worked with the University of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute before coming to 80,000 Hours. Peter co-founded Effective Altruism Australia, a tax-deductible charity that in its first 2 years has raised over $1.5 million for effective charities, founded a mobile phone repairs company, and managed a large sales team at the age of 18.
Jenna Peters
Advisor
Before 80,000 Hours, Jenna worked as a project manager at the Centre for Effective Altruism and a Post-Baccalaureate Fellow at the Center for Global Women’s Health Technologies at Duke University. Jenna graduated summa cum laude from Duke University with a BS in neuroscience.
Rob Wiblin
Head of Research
Rob won a scholarship to study genetics and economics at the Australian National University, graduating top of his class and being named Young Alumnus of the Year in 2015. He worked as a research economist in various Australian Government agencies, before moving to the UK to work at the Centre for Effective Altruism, where he was Research Director and then Executive Director, before moving to 80,000 Hours. He was also a founding board member of Animal Charity Evaluators and a member of the World Economic Forum's Global Shapers Community.
Freelancers
María Gutiérrez Rojas
Graphic Designer & Job Board Manager
María graduated from NYU Tisch’s Film and TV program with a concentration in traditional hand-drawn animation and received several scholarships from The Art Student’s League of NY, where she studied representational painting and drawing. She works remotely from Costa Rica.
Keiran Harris
Podcast Producer
Keiran is a former professional poker player and coach. He was sponsored by PokerStars, the largest online poker company in the world, and made dozens of instructional videos for Run It Once, a leading poker strategy community. He’s had articles published in Forbes and Quillette, and made the obvious transition from a graduate psychology program at the University of Melbourne to producer of the 80,000 Hours Podcast.
CEA staff who work with 80,000 Hours
80,000 Hours is part of the Centre for Effective Altruism.
Josh Axford
Head of Operations
Josh manages operations for CEA in the UK. Before joining CEA, he went from COO to CEO of a marine research charity working towards a world where marine life and humans thrive together. He studied Physics at university and attended the Royal Military Academy of Sandhurst, where he was commissioned as an officer in the British Army. He is also a professionally trained project manager and an alpine mountaineering instructor.
Louis Dixon
Finance Lead
Louis oversees financial planning and control for both CEA US and CEA UK. Before CEA, Louis worked as a finance performance improvement consultant with a range of public and private sector clients. Louis has a BSc in Economics and Politics from the University of Bristol.
Caitlin Elizondo
Head of People Operations
Caitlin manages the CEA operations team, as well as the Berkeley office space. She has a background in operations work from her time with the Frameworks Institute in DC and working in academic administration. She has a B.A. in linguistics from Haverford College and an M.S. in sociolinguistics from Georgetown University.
Chloe Malone
U.S. Operations Specialist
Chloe is responsible for analyzing and improving our operations, managing our legal compliance, and handling some of our external communications. She was previously the communications coordinator for Effective Altruism Australia; alongside her work for CEA, she's currently a project manager for a fundraising gaming app being developed for an NGO. She graduated from the University of Sydney and holds a B.A. in two majors: Philosophy, and Media and Communications.
Our Advisors
Dr Nick Beckstead
Trustee
Nick is a program officer at the Open Philanthropy Project, where he oversees a significant proportion of research and grantmaking related to reducing global catastrophic risks. Before that, he was a research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute, and wrote his PhD thesis on how ordinary efforts to do good neglect the crucial importance of the long-run future. We find his analysis and feedback invaluable.
Dr Owen Cotton-Barratt
Research advisor
Owen has a PhD in pure mathematics from Oxford. He has published in several disciplines and now works as a Research Fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute. We turn to him when we need to vet some tricky analysis.
Professor Hilary Greaves
Trustee
Hilary is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford and Director of the Global Priorities Institute. Her research focuses on issues of global priorisation, foundational issues in consequentialism, interpersonal aggregation, population ethics, moral uncertainty, and the interface between ethics and economics. She has been interviewed about these topics on our podcast, and joined our governing board in 2019.
Dr Toby Ord
Trustee
Toby is a Fellow of Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute, an expert in global prioritisation, and has been repeatedly covered in the international media for promoting cost-effective philanthropy and founding Giving What We Can.
Dr Jess Whittlestone
Research advisor
After studying Maths and Philosophy at Oxford, Jess helped to develop our coaching process and research. She has a PhD in Behavioural Science and has worked for the Behavioural Insights Team as a consultant for government, specialising in security and foreign policy. Currently she's a researcher at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at Cambridge.
Claire Zabel
Trustee
Claire leads the Open Philanthropy Project's grantmaking on effective altruism, and does research and makes grants relating to the reduction of global catastrophic risks. She has a B.S. and M.S. in Earth Systems from Stanford University, where she did research related to the science, ethics, and governance of solar geoengineering. She joined our governing board in 2019.