Biography
Dr Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh is the Executive Director of the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge. He is also an Academic Manager at the Future of Humanity Institute, University of Oxford, and his research interests straddle all of the FHI’s core areas. His current roles include project management of the Oxford Martin Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology, Steering Committee guidance over the FHI-Amlin Research Collaboration on Systemic Risk, and consultant management with Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk. His current focus is on risks and impacts of emerging technologies, including near-term impacts of AI and robotics, biotechnology including synthetic biology and genomics, surveillance technology and existential risk.
Prior to joining the Future of Humanity Institute, Seán completed a PhD in genome evolution at Trinity College Dublin, where his work on bioinformatics software design was described by reviewers as likely to see ”very wide application in this age of ultrahigh throughput sequencing”; to date his SearchDOGS software has been used to discover over a thousand missing genes across yeast species. He has published in a diverse set of fields including genomics, molecular evolution and artificial intelligence. He has a degree in human genetics, and is a Scholar of Trinity College.
