About

I’m a PhD candidate at Columbia University studying collaboration, knowledge production, and governance at the frontiers of technology. I’ll defend my dissertation in summer 2027.

My dissertation, Culture and Organization in the Maintenance of Ethereum, is an organizational ethnography of software governance and R&D. For seven years, I followed Ethereum protocol researchers and engineers in their coordination to maintain a high-stakes, open technical infrastructure. I’m working on turning this research into a book.

With my PhD advisor Gil Eyal and Jack LaViolette (University of Michigan), we also study AI safety research as a trading zone between universities, AI companies, philanthropies, and governments. You can see a blog post featuring some early results here. I was delighted that this project received Columbia’s 2026 Merton Award for Outstanding Scholarship.

I’ve been lucky to spend time as a visiting scholar at Stanford and the Ethereum Foundation, and I helped design Columbia College’s first undergraduate course on AI and society. Before coming to Columbia, I studied at The New School and Humboldt University of Berlin.

Find my CV here and a list of my publications here.

Contact

You can write me an email at thieser.anna@gmail.com. You can also find me on LinkedIn and X.