AI Anxiety + Human Flourishing

Alexis Ohanian

Alexis Ohanian is a tech founder and venture capitalist. He is the Co-Founder and former Executive Chairman of Reddit, which he started in 2005, left in 2010 and then returned to lead the turnaround in 2014 before resigning in protest in 2020; it’s currently valued at $30B+. In 2020, he founded Seven Seven Six, a new firm built like a technology company that deploys venture capital with over $1.3B in assets under management. He is the founding control owner of Angel City Football Club and Los Angeles Golf Club, and the founder of ATHLOS. Alexis is also an investor in Chelsea FC Women, winner of six consecutive WSL titles. In 2022, he launched the 776 Foundation to support marginalized individuals and announced a $20M commitment to climate action through his new 776 Fellowship Program. He’s written a national bestselling book, Without Their Permission, and also created the Business Dad Podcast to interview fathers about what it means to be a dad in today’s world balancing family and career.

Megan Barnett

Megan Barnett is Vice Provost for Pan University Initiatives at the University of Virginia, where she assists and advises the provost, faculty, and university leaders on academic and strategic initiatives. She partners with the Vice President for Research on initiatives to support and enhance research across the University.

Prior to returning to Virginia, Megan worked in the Office of the Provost at Yale University from 2015 - 2020, first as Associate Provost and Chief of Staff, and then as Vice Provost for Strategic Initiatives. There she participated in all planning functions of the university, including budget, space, and people. She worked with the provost and other university leaders on strategic planning, academic priorities, advancement, and special projects.

Kelly Crace

Kelly Crace is Executive Director of the Contemplative Sciences Center. He previously served as associate vice president for health and wellness and director of the Center for Mindfulness and Authentic Excellence at William & Mary and directed college mental health centers at both William & Mary and Duke University. A licensed psychologist, he is co-author of Authentic Excellence: Flourishing & Resilience in a Relentless World and the Life Values Inventory. He has conducted more than 3,000 seminars for organizations on values, flourishing, resilience, and organizational development.

David Danks

David Danks is the Polk JSF Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy, AI, & Data Science at the University of Virginia. His research examines the ethical, psychological, and policy issues around AI and robotics, and he also develops novel AI systems and computational cognitive models. He was an inaugural member of the National AI Advisory Committee (USA) and serves on multiple advisory boards for industry, government, and academia. Danks is a recipient of a James S. McDonnell Foundation Scholar Award and an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship.

Jean-Louis Guillou

Jean-Louis Guillou is an international entrepreneur and social-impact leader working at the intersection of AI, inclusive economic development, and cross-sector partnership. He serves as Steering Committee Chair of Generous, an initiative building a technology, economic, and governance framework to help shift the global economy from extractive to more participative and inclusive models. His background spans global business leadership and finance, including roles as Country Head of Cargill Indonesia and earlier as an investment banker at UBS, and he is Co-Founder and Managing Director of Exponential Coaching International (EXOCI). He previously chaired YPO's Social Impact Network and serves on the board of the Council of Change, a UN entity creating pathways to economic empowerment through public-private partnerships.

Mary Anne Hitt

Mary Anne Hitt is Managing Director of U.S. Initiatives at Climate Imperative, a foundation supporting work to cut emissions this decade at the scale needed to confront climate change. With over 25 years of experience building and leading campaigns and organizations, she served as the Sierra Club’s National Director of Campaigns and spent a decade directing its Beyond Coal Campaign, recognized as one of the most successful environmental campaigns in history. She has appeared in the National Geographic film From the Ashes and the Emmy-winning series Years of Living Dangerously, hosted the climate podcast “No Place Like Home,” and contributed to the anthologies All We Can Save and Not Too Late. She was named a 2024 Bloomberg Green Champion and to the 2015 POLITICO 50.

Shiva Jahani

Shiva Jahani, PhD, is a lecturer, data scientist, statistician, and wellness practitioner whose work bridges research with evidence-informed approaches to well-being. She serves as a lecturer, statistician, and graduate faculty member at the University of Central Florida, teaching research methods, yoga, and meditation. She is a certified meditation practitioner through the Chopra Center, a certified sound healing practitioner, trained in breathwork, and has co-published three books. Dr. Jahani offers virtual and in-person classes, corporate retreats, and workshops in meditation, sound healing, breathwork, and yoga.

Anton Korinek

Anton Korinek is Head of Transformative AI Economic Studies at Anthropic, on leave from his position as a Commonwealth Professor at the University of Virginia, where he also serves as Faculty Director of the Economics of Transformative AI (EconTAI) Initiative. His research analyzes how to prepare for a world of transformative AI systems, investigating its implications for economic growth, labor markets, inequality, and society, and has been featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and The Economist. He was named to the 2025 TIME100 AI list of the most influential people in artificial intelligence. He is a Nonresident Senior Fellow at Brookings and the Peterson Institute and a Research Fellow at the CEPR. He received his PhD from Columbia University in 2007 and has been a visiting scholar at Harvard, the IMF, and the World Bank.

Roshni Raveendhran

Roshni Raveendhran is an Assistant Professor of Business Administration in the Leadership and Organizational Behavior Area at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business and a Faculty Fellow with the Batten Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Her research examines the future of work, with a particular focus on the psychological underpinnings of the human–technology relationship and has been published in journals such as Academy of Management Review and Harvard Business Review, as well as featured in The New York Times, CNN, and Forbes. At Darden, she teaches Minds and Machines, an MBA elective on how leaders can effectively leverage AI, as well as Negotiations and Leading Organizations. She was named one of Poets & Quants’ 40 Best Business School Professors Under 40 (2021) and has twice received the Frederick S. Morton Leadership Award for her mentorship of student leaders.

Michael Sheehy

Michael R. Sheehy, PhD, is a Research Associate Professor and the Director of Research at the Contemplative Sciences Center, University of Virginia. He is a meditation researcher and founding Principal of the CIRCL, Contemplative Innovation + Research Co-Lab, Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Contemplative Studies (JCS), and Co-Director of the AI + Human Flourishing Initiative that investigates the bidirectional loop of the human-AI interface vectored toward flourishing.

James R. Stone

James R. Stone, MD, PhD is Professor and Vice Chair for Research in the Department of Radiology and Medical Imaging at the University of Virginia School of Medicine. His research uses advanced neuroimaging and computational analysis to understand human brain health, including work with the Department of Defense on repeated low-level blast exposure. He is developing the Normative Neurological Health (NNH) framework, a precision-health approach to characterizing individual brain structure, function, and performance. A key application is precision contemplative health, using NNH profiles to understand why individuals respond differently to practices like meditation and breathwork.