Laura Messner

Laura Messner is the Executive Board Co-Lead & Chief of Staff at the Think Tanks & Civil Societies Program. Laura has been at TTCSP since February; first as a Research Intern for the Western Europe Team and a member of the Technical Team, then as the Science & Technology Project Lead. She continued to lead the Science & Technology Team to prepare for the Science & Technology workshop along with leading TTCSP's research teams as Research Coordinator in Summer 2021. In fall, Laura was a Summit Coordinator and the Executive Assistant to the Director & Chief of Staff and currently serves as the Executive Board Co-Lead.

Laura’s main interests include, but are not limited to, legal and political theory and disruptive technologies' impact on our legal and political systems and societies. Laura is a Research Assistant at the Legal Priorities Project, where she is conducting research on legal theory and how changes in legal norms and values are affected and shaped by the long-term challenges of artificial intelligence to judicial decision-making, and she has been continuing her research as a Stanford Existential Risks Initiative Fellow since summer. She was previously a Research Assistant at AlQuraishi Lab through a partnership between Harvard Medical School and Columbia University Irving Medical Center, where she studied protein geometry under the guidance of a senior research fellow at Harvard Medical School. Laura has two international short screenplay writing and filmmaking awards from Portugal, and two national scholastic writing awards from Turkey for which her literary criticism essays were featured in anthologies.