People — Human-Centered AI Lab

Who we are

A small leadership team and an independent board connect model evaluation, public administration, product development, history, and policy.

Leadership

Katherine Elkins

Co-Founder · Co-Director

Co-Founder and Co-Director, Human-Centered AI Lab. AI safety researcher and Professor of Humanities at Kenyon College. Author, The Shapes of Stories (Cambridge UP, 2022) and Proust's In Search of Lost Time: Philosophical Perspectives (OUP, 2022). Ph.D., UC Berkeley. Principal Investigator for the Modern Language Association team at NIST CAISI. Principal Investigator of Archival Intelligence through Schmidt Sciences HAVI. Recent and upcoming invited and keynote talks include OpenAI, UNESCO, Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar, RALLY Innovation, and the University of Michigan Annual Data Science & AI Summit.

Personal website · Research · Kenyon profile

Jon Chun

Co-Founder · Director

Co-Founder and Director, Human-Centered AI Lab. AI research scientist. Co-creator of the first human-centered AI curriculum. Created SentimentArcs, an open-source toolkit implementing ensemble methods for diachronic sentiment analysis. ICML 2024 oral presentation (top 2%). Co-Principal Investigator for the Modern Language Association team at NIST CAISI; Co-PI of Archival Intelligence through Schmidt Sciences HAVI. Co-founded SafeWeb ($26M acquisition by Symantec; first In-Q-Tel security investment). UC Berkeley EECS, UT Austin MS. Two US patents.

Personal website · Research · Kenyon profile

Board of Directors

Fredrika Pfeiffer

Board Member

Contract Coordinator, NYC Parks
Former Project Manager, U.S. GSA

Public-sector operator with experience in contracts, procurement, compliance, and project delivery. Her background in data analytics and human-centered AI research helps the board connect research plans to sound administration.

More about Fredrika

Pfeiffer studied Sociology and Data Analytics at Kenyon College, where her IPHS research covered natural language processing, statistical models, and symbolic AI. Before NYC Parks, she worked at the U.S. General Services Administration and Carahsoft and earned a Google Project Management Certificate. Her public-service work has also included Ohio Jobs and Family Services, legal aid, and child protective services.

Raul Romero

Board Member

Co-Founder, Kite ML
Former Senior Product Manager, eBay

Applied-AI builder and entrepreneur with experience at eBay and Kite ML. He brings product development, robotics, and public-service technology experience to the board.

More about Raul

At Kenyon, Romero used natural language processing to study Venezuelan political discourse across more than 300,000 posts. He later led AI product work at eBay and is pursuing a master’s in design engineering at Harvard. His civic work includes co-founding Yakera and receiving Kenyon’s International Studies and Leopoldo López awards.

Recent: Interviewing Leopoldo López · September 26, 2026

Jennifer Siegel

Board Member

Professor of History and Public Policy
Duke University

Historian of intelligence, diplomacy, and statecraft. She brings long-range judgment about institutional risk, evidence, and oversight to the Lab’s governance.

More about Jennifer

Siegel is the Bruce R. Kuniholm Distinguished Professor at Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy. Her books include For Peace and Money and the prize-winning Endgame. Before joining Duke in 2021, she taught history at Ohio State University for nearly two decades.