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 Senior Research Associate at both the YNOT Institute at Queens’ College and the El-Erian Institute at Cambridge Judge Business School. His role extends to being an External Lecturer at Copenhagen Business School (CBS), where he specializes in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning.
Prior to his engagement at Cambridge, Micha was instrumental in developing courses on machine learning, statistics, and consumer research as an Assistant Professor at CBS in Copenhagen. His research interests lie at the intersection of health policy, consumer behavior, and behavioral public policy, leveraging quantitative models and the application of AI. Micha currently leads the YNOT Institute's PREDICT project, which is dedicated to examining the predictability of outcomes in behavioral policy interventions. Micha is a proponent of integrating emerging AI technologies in policy-making, advocating that the most effective policies are those that synergize with, rather than resist, the advancements in AI.

Dr Peter Ochieng
Research Associate
Dr Peter Ochieng is an inaugural DeepMind Research Fellow in the Computer Science and Technology department 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 or the PREDICT project where the goal is to exploit machine learning techniques to make LLMs to simulate human behaviours when subjected to certain nudges; through having a normal chat with finetuned LLMs, we hope to get an impression of how humans will respond to certain nudges.

Billy Shi
PhD student
Billy Shi is a PhD student in Engineering at Queens’ College. His research interest is designing interactive generative AI systems for software engineering, behavioural science and education.

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
Jenny Fan is the administrative lead for the YNOT Institute and handles all non-directorial matters. She holds a PhD and BA from the University of Cambridge.
Academic Steering Committee

Prof Neil Lawrence

Prof Alan Blackwell

Dr Mohamed El-Erian
External Advisory Board

Dr Mikihide Yamazaki




