Terah Lyons

Terah Lyons was the first Executive Director of the global nonprofit Partnership on AI and led emerging technology policy for President Barack Obama’s Office of Science and Technology Policy. She is known for her expertise in the field of artificial intelligence and emerging technology governance and policy.

Terah has focused her career on building capacity in the public and private sectors for more effective AI development and governance. Currently, she is an Executive In Residence at Zetta Venture Partners working with early-stage founders building AI technology companies in critical new domains like climate science, materials science, and synthetic biology. Previously, she led the launch of the Partnership on AI, a multi-stakeholder non-profit initiative focused on advancing the benefits and addressing the challenges of artificial intelligence co-founded by a coalition of technology companies, civil society organizations, and academic experts. In the Obama Administration, she served as Policy Advisor to the U.S. Chief Technology Officer in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), where she led policy on AI and intelligent transportation systems, and advised on issues related to the innovation economy, national security, and diversity, equity, and inclusion in the technology industry. While there, she co-directed the White House’s Future of Artificial Intelligence Initiative, which facilitated stakeholders in the public and private domains to frame the first domestic policy strategy on machine intelligence.
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Terah continues to advise companies, governments and tribal nations, universities, and nonprofit organizations on issues related to emerging technology, policy, and geopolitics. She currently sits on the Steering Committee of Stanford's AI Index project, and previously served on the Study Panel for Stanford's One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence (AI100). She is an Advisor to the Administrative Conference of the United States on the use of artificial intelligence in Federal agencies, and has been an Executive Fellow with the Tech Talent Project, a Mozilla Foundation Technology Policy Fellow, and a Fellow with the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. She is a graduate of Harvard University.