Annika Burman 🔸
Bio
Participation4
My current cause prio:
- Farmed animal welfare, especially in Asia
- AI safety
- Global mental health
Comparative advantages of mine:
- I speak advanced Mandarin, and grew up attending Chinese immersion school!
- I have pretty good social skills, and enjoy working with others
- I seem to have good judgement when it comes to strategic thinking — past recommendations I've given on what amorphous projects should be shaped into have been successful in hindsight!
Eventually, I am hoping to found my own international nonprofit. I am particularly interested in China-related initiatives, including farmed animal welfare in China and U.S.-China coordination on AI governance.
How others can help me
I am looking for full-time employment starting January 2027. I particularly enjoy roles with high agency and a wide variety of tasks. I prefer in-person roles to remote positions. I am particularly interested in China- or Asia-related initiatives — this includes initiatives related to farmed animal welfare in China and U.S.-China coordination on AI governance.
I am Co-President of the EA Club at the University of Michigan. If you have opportunities that you would like us to share with members, or you are interested in being a speaker at a meeting, reach out to [email protected].
Posts 2
Comments7
One pushback on your comments on the transportation being easy -- there were 2-3 students from the University of Michigan who wanted to attend but could not get transportation to the event. The group did not have the budget to cover a vehicle rental, and it would have been about 3.5 hours each way (this is from memory when I attended, so it may be wrong). We are accounting for this in our budget for next year. I wasn't involved in the planning this year, but from my perspective, you've overstated the accessibility of the location.
Hopefully next year we will able to have UMich represented as well!
I'm so glad my forum post was able to play a role in this experience for you. It sounds like you were also very personally affected by the internship -- seeing the uncertainty and suffering up close is far different from reading about it from behind a screen in a developed country; I really hope other EAs can have experiences like ours to better understand the ground-level complexities of making change in a messy world.
If only the team had adopted puppies while I was there...
The mental health EA cause space should explore more experimental, scalable interventions, such as promoting anti-inflammatory diets at school/college cafeterias to reduce depression in young people, or using lighting design to reduce seasonal depression. What I've seen of this cause area so far seems focused on psychotherapy in low-income countries. I feel like we're missing some more out-of-the-box interventions here. Does anyone know of any relevant work along these lines?
Since you referenced my post, I thought I'd chime in! This was my first ever EA post. I had written a slightly modified version as a guest post for the Fish Welfare Initiative's blog, and then Haven (ED at FWI) encouraged me to post it on the forum for it to find a more relevant audience. There's a good chance that without this themed event signaling to me that my internship experience could be relevant and useful for others to read, I would never have posted on the EA Forum. Even after posting, I was surprised by the positive reception my post got, which has made me much more likely to write future forum posts -- I've already started drafting some ideas. In short, I really liked this event, because it gave me justification to post something that feels more anecdotal/personal than what I usually see on the forum.
Thanks for making and sharing this! A friend who is new to EA is curious about AIxBio risk and I think this could be helpful for her.