11. Enabling the Participatory Exploration of Alternative Futures With ParEvo

SJ Beard is a Senior Research Associate and Academic Programme Manager at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge, an Associated Researcher at the Institute for Futures Studies and an AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker. SJ Beard works on the Evaluation of Extreme Technological Risks, and other ethical problems with ensuring a long term future for humanity. They also have a wide range of skills and experiences producing high quality research, training and analysis across education and public affairs.

Tom Hobson’s work is focused on understanding and mapping the militarisation of emerging technologies, particularly biological technologies. His research, more broadly, is concerned with understanding how scientific and expert communities and military and policy actors imagine the future, the ways that existing technologies shape their visions of the future, and how they endeavour to secure a particular vision of the future through technology and innovation. Tom’s work aims to guide norms and policy in the present by developing a better understanding of how future (extreme) technological risk can be (re)produced through innovation and technology. Tom has a background in International Relations, Security Studies and STS, having completed his PhD within the Centre for War & Technology at the University of Bath. He has also worked in policy, research and project assessment in the fields of biosecurity and synthetic biology.

Lara Mani is a Senior Research Associate in Environmental Risk and Risk Communication at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, University of Cambridge.