Jovan Powar

AI governance, privacy, & risk researcher

I’m a researcher with a focus on cross-disciplinary approaches to governance and risk management for emerging tech.

In my PhD at Cambridge I worked on bringing risk-based methods to technical privacy research, with publications at PETS, FAccT, and CHI. At the Alan Turing Institute, I led a project on GenAI risk governance with major UK financial institutions, studying how practitioners understand and respond to frontier AI risk using structured elicitation methods.

A thread through my work is that different communities—AI safety researchers, regulators, risk practitioners—are modelling risk at fundamentally different levels of abstraction. Bridging those gaps requires integrative methodological work, combining technical and non-technical tools into coherent playbooks that are useful across technical and institutional contexts.

I'm looking for my next opportunity in research, policy, or industry. If you need someone with strong technical grounding, experience synthesising across disciplinary boundaries, and the communication skills to make that synthesis useful—get in touch!