Team TARA
Yanni Kyriacos
Founder & Director
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Yanni previously co-founded and led AI Safety Australia & New Zealand, where he ran TARA v1, the AI Safety Careers Conference, launched Australia's first AI safety co-working space, and built monthly meetups across six cities.
Before AI safety, Yanni spent a decade in marketing and strategy at LinkedIn, News Corp, Spark Wave, and various agencies.
He has also served on advisory boards for Giving What We Can, RESULTS International, and The Deli Women & Children's Centre.
Technical Program Manager
Zac Broeren

Zac is a Master of AI student at UNSW with a Bachelor of Science in Mathematical Physics (First Class Honours) from the University of Melbourne. He completed TARA v1, where his final project focused on causal interventions on a chess model using linear probes, and was accepted into SPAR in 2025.
Zac was President and Education Director of EA University of Melbourne from 2022-2024, helping organise EAGx Australia 2023. He has worked at Elevate Education since 2021, recently helping develop their AI seminars.
Nelson Gardner-Challis
Advisor
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Nelson is the Technical Lead at Arcadia Impact.
Previously he co-organised the TARA pilot program in 2025, worked as a Technical Project Manager for the UK AISI Bounty programme managing three teams building evaluations on strategic deception, synthetic environment detection and propensity to sandbag.
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Nelson completed the LASR Labs 2025 Summer Cohort, focused on control evaluation research that investigated the untrusted monitoring protocol.
Ryan Kidd
Advisor

Ryan is Co-Executive Director of MATS, a Co-Founder and Board Member of the London Initiative for Safe AI (LISA), a Manifund Regrantor, and advisor to AI Safety ANZ, Catalyze Impact, and Pivotal Research.
Previously, he completed a PhD in Physics at the University of Queensland (UQ) and conducted independent research in AI alignment for the Stanford Existential Risks Initiative.
Dan Wilhelm
Advisor

Dan is a visiting researcher at Meridian Cambridge, studying sleeper agents and mechanistic interpretability.
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He has designed and led corporate courses in data science and machine learning, earning recognition as an inaugural Distinguished Faculty member at General Assembly. Dan also served as TARA's first teaching assistant.
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Earlier, he co-founded a social networking startup after pursuing a PhD in Computation and Neural Systems at Caltech.
Our Mission
Create and accelerate AI safety careers across Asia-Pacific
Our Vision
A world where humanity thrives alongside beneficial AI
Our Offer
The technical skills, portfolio, and network to pursue AI safety fellowships and roles - delivered part-time in your city
