Directors
Dr Mo (Mark) Khater
Academic Director
Dr Mark Khater, Head of the Centre for Strategy and Performance at the Institute of Manufacturing, University of Cambridge, is a Systems and AI engineer. His research pursuits span strategic modelling, competence and coordination identification and management, as well as innovation capabilities and processes. Dr Khater holds the honorary position of Fellow Commoner at Queens' College.
Prof Lucia A Reisch
Academic Director
Prof Lucia A Reisch is the Inaugural El-Erian Professor of Behavioural Economics and Policy at the University of Cambridge. Her research focusses on behavioural economics, behavioural public policy, sustainable consumption, intercultural consumer behaviour, consumers and digitisation, as well as consumer policy. She was elected a Fellow of Queens' College in 2021.
Researchers
Dr Micha A Kaiser
Deputy Director & Senior Research Associate
Dr Micha Kaiser serves as a Deputy Director and Senior Research Associate at the YNOT Institute. His is an Assistant Research Professor at the El-Erian Institute at the Cambridge Judge Business School. His research interests lie at the intersection of health policy, consumer behavior, and behavioural public policy, leveraging quantitative models and the application of AI. Micha currently leads the PREDICT project, which is dedicated to examining the predictability of outcomes in behavioural policy interventions.
Dr Peter Ochieng
Research Associate
Dr Peter Ochieng is the inaugural DeepMind Research Fellow in Computer Science at Department of Computer Science and Technology at the University of Cambridge. His technical expertise is in Natural Language Processing (NLP), focusing on low-resource languages. He is also interested in speech synthesis that is agnostic to accents and low-resource acoustic features. Peter is part of the PREDICT project where the goal is to exploit machine learning techniques to make LLMs simulate human behaviours when subjected to certain nudges.
Billy Shi
PhD student
Billy Shi is a software engineer at Apple and a PhD candidate in Engineering at Queens’ College. His current research is in human perception and adoption of AI systems in software engineering, and designing interactive generative AI systems for software engineering, behavioural science and education. Billy is part of the PREDICT project and focuses on user-facing system designs.
Colleen Sheridan
Research Assistant
Colleen Sheridan is a Natural Scientist and Psychologist by training, with a technical background in data science and AI. Her research interests are at the intersection of behavioural psychology and AI interpretability. At the YNOT, Colleen works on the PREDICT II project, building a harmonised dataset of behavioural interventions, and building an agentic research system to understand model behaviour within academic settings.
Lara Greening
PhD student
Lara Greening is currently studying for a PhD in Psychology at Queens’ College. Her PhD, supervised by Professor Lucia Reisch and Dr Lee de Wit, focuses on using machine learning to predict voting behaviour and political ideology. Lara’s research interests include data science, machine learning, computational social science, and the application of machine learning to improve society. She works on the PREDICT project, exploring the effectiveness of classical machine learning algorithms in comparison to LLMs.
Institute Staff
Dr Jenny Fan
Administrator
Dr Jenny Fan is the administrative lead for the YNOT Institute and handles all non-directorial matters. She holds a PhD and BA in Natural Sciences from the University of Cambridge.
Academic Steering Committee
Prof Neil Lawrence
Prof Alan Blackwell
Dr Mohamed El-Erian
External Advisory Board
Dr Mikihide Yamazaki