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 works on the political economy of superintelligence at The Anthropic Institute and is a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution (on leave). He runs novel agentic experiments, analyzes large-scale data, and studies what makes AI trustworthy for citizens and policymakers alike.
James Campsie
San Francisco, CA
James Campsie is Chief of Staff at Free Systems Lab, managing the lab’s day-to-day operations, growth, and external presence. James previously spent over six years at Milltown Partners, advising large technology companies and start-ups on their communications and policy challenges, in both London and San Francisco. James has also spent time working in Brussels, advising political parties on their communication strategies.
Visiting Faculty
Daniel M. Thompson
Los Angeles, CA
Dan is an Associate Professor of Political Science at UCLA, studying American politics and political methodology. His research at Free Systems examines how people interpret and receive political information via AI. He received his PhD in political science from Stanford.
Cassandra Handan-Nader
New York, NY
Sandy is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at New York University. Her research develops and applies machine learning techniques to measure and characterize the structure of conflict in American political institutions, with a particular focus on new methods for measuring partisan polarization. She received her PhD in political science from Stanford.
Alexander Fouirnaies
Chicago, IL
Alexander is an Associate Professor at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy, in the political economy group. At Free Systems, he is currently conducting a series of experiments exploring agentic legislature. He earned his PhD at the London School of Economics.
Fellows
Pairie Koh
Singapore
Pairie is a Research Associate at Nanyang Technological University where she is focused on continual learning and reinforcement learning. She’s interested in how we can design adaptive AI systems, as well as how institutions, incentives and governance can influence its development towards beneficial societal outcomes.
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.
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.
Max Whitford
Athens, GA
Max is a Master’s student in Public Administration & Policy at the University of Georgia, where he also earned his undergraduate degree in Economics in 2026. His recent research applies computational methods to answer how information and institutions shape strategic behavior in nonmarket environments. His current research for the lab focuses on the adoption of AI-augmented research systems. He plans to pursue a doctorate 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.