Staff

Michael Plant
Founder and Director

Michael is a a post-doctoral Research Fellow at the Wellbeing Research Centre, Oxford. Michael has a PhD in philosophy from the University of Oxford. Previously, he was Peter Singer’s Research Assistant and worked on Hippo, a happiness tracking app start-up. 

Clare Donaldson
Chief Operating Officer

Clare joined HLI after attending Charity Entrepreneurship’s Incubation Program. She has interned in the research team at the non-profit Development Media International and has a PhD in geophysics from the University of Cambridge.

Joel McGuire
Research Analyst

Joel has a Masters in Economics and Data Science from the University of Oklahoma, graduating top of his class. In his previous social science research he studied goal-achievement using novel datasets, structurally modelled migration within the US labour market, and mapped the geography of prospective language across the US.  ​

Trustees

Peter Brietbart

Peter is the CEO of the anxiety management app Mind Ease. He is a veteran of the effective altruism community with a background in philosophy, entrepreneurship and project management. 

Samantha Bernecker

Sam is a Clinical Research Scientist at Happify Health. She earned her PhD in Clinical Psychology from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2017 and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University. Before joining the team at Happify Health, Sam worked as a management consultant at Boston Consulting Group.

Barry Grimes

​Barry is an Events Associate at the Centre for Effective Altruism which produces the EA Global and EAGx conference series. He has over 10 years experience working in communication and stakeholder engagement roles across the public, private and not-for-profit sectors.

Advisors

Julian Jamison ​

Julian is a behavioural development economist with a particular focus on health and welfare analysis. He is currently a professor of economics at the University of Exeter and works with the World Bank and multiple governments around the world.

Karolina Sarek

Karolina is Co-founder and Director of Research at Charity Entrepreneurship. She also serves as a Fund Manager for the Effective Altruism Animal Welfare Fund, a mentor at WANBAM, and a consultant for various effective altruism non-profits. 

Peter Singer

Peter is the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University. He works on practical ethics, and is best known for the book Animal Liberation and his writings about global poverty.

Tatjana Višak

Tatjana is a philosopher specialising in ethics and political philosophy. She is currently based in the Department of Philosophy and Economics at the University of Bayreuth.

---

Our work has also been supported by the following volunteers:

Kaleem Ahmid, Jide Alaga, Justus Baumann, Ethan Bialick, Lucia Coulter, Carmen Csilla Medina, Brendan Eappen, Derek Foster, Tom Houlden, Ulf Johansson​, Florian Kuhlmeier​, Marcin Kowrygo, Fin Moorhouse, Nikita Patel, Teis Rasmussen, Vanessa See, Sid Sharma, Jasper Synowski​, Alan Taylor, Eemaan Thind, Sonia Vallentin, and Caitlin Walker.