The Human-Centered AI Lab is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit research organization (Human-Centered AI Lab, Inc., Ohio), founded by Katherine Elkins and Jon Chun. The Lab conducts AI research at the intersection of safety, governance, and the humanities and social sciences, providing an institutional umbrella for distributed teams of experts to secure funding and collaborate on human-centered AI research in the public interest.
The questions that animate our work are old ones: what kind of minds we are building, whose traditions they carry, and what they mean for human flourishing. We pursue them with the empirical rigor of AI safety research and the interpretive depth of the humanities.
Elkins and Chun co-created the world's first human-centered AI curriculum in 2016, integrating computational methods with ethics, governance, and humanistic inquiry; student research from that curriculum has since been downloaded 100,000+ times by more than 4,000 institutions across 198 countries. In 2023 they organized the Human-Centered AI Lab as an umbrella for distributed teams of researchers and domain experts to collaborate across geographic, institutional, and disciplinary boundaries. In March 2026 the Lab was incorporated as Human-Centered AI Lab, Inc., an Ohio nonprofit corporation, and in June 2026 it was recognized by the IRS as a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt public charity.
The Lab's co-founders serve as Principal Investigators representing the Modern Language Association — the largest scholarly organization in language and literature — in the consortium of NIST's Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI, formerly the U.S. AI Safety Institute), where their work focuses on how large language models process negation, prohibition, and persuasion. Elkins serves as Principal Investigator and Chun as Co-PI of the Schmidt Sciences Humanities and AI Virtual Institute (HAVI) Archival Intelligence project — an initiative to rescue endangered cultural heritage archives in New Orleans using AI with community-governed data sovereignty, funded by a Schmidt Sciences HAVI award administered through Kenyon College.
Additional affiliations of the Lab's founders include UNESCO (MONDIACULT expert consultation on AI and cultural heritage), the Notre Dame–IBM Technology Ethics Lab (multi-agent behavioral simulation of judicial decision-making), Bloomberg (AI Strategy course), and OpenAI (Education Guild, Higher Education Forum).
Governance and legal status. Human-Centered AI Lab, Inc. is an Ohio nonprofit corporation and an IRS-recognized 501(c)(3) tax-exempt public charity. The Lab is governed by an independent board of directors (see People) and maintains dedicated banking and grant administration. Donations are tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law. EIN: 41-4616677. For grant administration, due diligence, or partnership inquiries, please contact us.