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
Leticia Auriemo
Palo Alto, CA
Leticia is a junior at Stanford pursuing a BS in Economics, with research experience at the Hoover Institution and prior work in M&A and early-stage impact investing. Her current focus is the agentic movement of money and mechanism design for agent-to-agent interactions in the emerging Internet of Agents economy. Looking ahead, she hopes to help build the rails that let this economy scale.
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.
Chloe Feng
Stanford, CA
Chloe trained as an analyst at Cornerstone Research before becoming a technical IC on data infrastructure and products in tech. She’s exploring how prediction markets reflect broader sentiment, and strategies to share information fairly in the service of a more equitable society.
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.
Anya Pilipentseva
London
Originally from Russia, Anya holds a Master’s degree in Economics from Central European University and has worked as a research assistant at the London School of Economics and INSEAD. She is now a consultant on the Venture Capital team at the International Finance Corporation (IFC) and is working on a Meta AI advertising experiment with Andy Hall. She will begin a PhD in Finance at INSEAD this fall.
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.
Max Whitford
Athens, GA
Max is an Honors Economics undergraduate at the University of Georgia. His recent research applies computational methods like spectral clustering and text-as-data to answer how information and institutions shape strategic behavior. His current research for the lab focuses on the adoption of AI-infused research systems. He is pursuing a Master’s in Public Administration at UGA and plans to enter a doctoral program in political economy or strategy.
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.
New Media Fellows
Jasmine Hundal
San Francisco, CA
Jasmine is a student at Stanford GSB working across AI, data infrastructure, and new media. Her interests center on how technology shapes culture, power, and individual freedom. She aims to contribute to building systems that increase human agency at scale.