Co-Director of the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER)
Seán is Co-Director of the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) and Co-PI on CSER’s research projects. Under his and Huw Price’s leadership, CSER has grown in two years to be a world-leading academic research center on extreme technological risk.
Since 2011 Sean has played a central role in international research on the long-term impacts and risks of artificial intelligence (AI), project managing the Oxford Martin Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology from 2011-2014, co-developing the Strategic AI Research Centre (Cambridge-Oxford collaboration) in 2015, and co-developing the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (Cambridge-Oxford-Imperial-Berkeley collaboration) in 2015/16. He has had an active program of engagement with both policymakers and research leaders in computer science on long-term AI, in the UK, Europe and US.
Prior to Cambridge, Sean also established the FHI-Amlin Collaboration on Systemic Risk – a major academic-reinsurance industry partnership on catastrophic risk modelling – as well as several other research programmes in Oxford. His primary research interests include: emerging technologies, risk, technology policy, horizon-scanning and foresight, expertise elicitation and aggregation, genomics, synthetic biology, evolution and artificial intelligence. He has a PhD in genomics from Trinity College Dublin. His work is supported by the Templeton World Charity Foundation as part of the Managing Extreme Technological Risk project at CSER.
