Alexander Turner
Independent Researcher at Self-employed
Berkeley, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolAlexander Turner is an independent researcher and PhD-trained AI scientist based in Berkeley with a decade of experience bridging theoretical foundations and hands-on agent development. His work spans academic and applied settings—from postdoctoral research and collaborations at CHAI and Oxford’s FHI to mentoring junior alignment researchers at SERI—focusing on agent behavior, retargetability, and incentives like deactivation avoidance. He has built planning-agent libraries, novel environments (including a ground-up chess environment), and has practical experience steering language models via activation vectors. Comfortable both teaching and mentoring, he has a track record of translating formal theorems into testable experiments and tooling. Known for tinkering roots in game-driven CS, he combines curiosity about video-game-inspired problems with rigorous safety-oriented research.
10 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor's degree, Bachelor's degree at Grinnell CollegeDoctor of Philosophy - PhD, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD at Oregon State UniversityDiploma, Diploma at Bettendorf High School
Japanese, French, English
Github Skills (119)
javascript10
openai-gym10
latex10
maze10
katex10
flowchart10
mindmap10
markdown9
ai9
taskbar9
google-font9
typesetting9
deep-learning9
sequence-diagram9
preloading9
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
alexander-turner/PyPlan
Apr 2017 - Feb 2018
Contributions:249 commits, 128 pushes, 7 branches in 9 months
alexander-turner/.timestamps
Mar 2025 - Jul 2026
Contributions:3248 pushes, 1 branch in 1 year 4 months
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