The Team
The people building Free Systems
A distributed research team spanning Stanford, Harvard, Michigan, LSE, Singapore, Rwanda, Tokyo, and London — united by the conviction that AI can strengthen democracy if we build it right.
Leadership
Andy Hall
Stanford, CA
Andy Hall is a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He studies how societies build structures that constrain their most powerful actors, and what happens when those structures fail. Free Systems is his research program dedicated to building, testing, and breaking the prototypes that will define whether AI-powered governance preserves human liberty.
Fellows
Vania Chow
Stanford, CA
Originally from Hong Kong, Vania is finishing a BS in Computer Science and MS in Management Science & Engineering at Stanford. She is focused on prediction markets — specifically the data infrastructure and governance architecture needed to make market-based probabilities trustworthy and institutionally useful at scale.
Sho Miyazaki
Tokyo / Cambridge, MA
Sho Miyazaki is a Visiting Researcher at the Waseda Institute of Political Economy and an incoming Ph.D. student in Public Policy at Harvard University. His research examines the political economy of governance in the digital age, with particular attention to artificial intelligence, digital platforms, and voting institutions.
Wisdom Okechukwu
Kigali, Rwanda
With a background in STEM and blockchain engineering, Wisdom brings a technical foundation rooted in building at the intersection of decentralized systems and emerging technology. He is focused on pushing the boundaries of AI and crypto through swarm intelligence.
Jessica Persano
Stanford, CA
Jessica is a Pre-Doctoral Research Fellow at Stanford GSB. She graduated summa cum laude from UCLA with degrees in Political Science (Honors) and Geography/Environmental Studies. At Free Systems, her work focuses on how AI systems behave empirically and what that means for political and academic research.
Anna Sun
Bay Area
Anna is a Research Assistant working for Professor Andy Hall. Previously, she was an undergraduate student at UC Berkeley. Her main research interests are labor economics and political economy.
PhD Fellows
Samuel G.Z. Asher
Stanford, CA
Samuel is a fourth year PhD student in Political Economy at Stanford GSB. He studies American politics, especially state and local governments, and political methodology, especially tools for observational causal inference. He’s interested in how AI tools can improve and accelerate social science research.
Janet Malzahn
San Francisco
Janet is a third year PhD student in Political Economics at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. She studies American politics using large-scale datasets, causal inference designs, and formal models, with a particular interest in elections and climate change.
