Christina Lee is a Visiting Associate Professor of Law and Privacy and Technology Law Fellow at the George Washington University Law School. Her research explores how the law should address the harms of emerging technologies, particularly artificial intelligence (AI). She examines how the complexity of the tech ecosystem—how actors in the tech industry interact with each other to produce, develop, and deploy products and services powered by emerging technologies—challenges the efforts to use traditional legal frameworks that predate the rise of AI to address the harms of AI.

Professor Lee earned a BA with Distinction in International Relations, a BS with Distinction in Mathematics, and an MS in Computer Science from Stanford University. She received her JD cum laude from Harvard Law School, where she served as a Submissions Manager and a Symposium Articles Editor for the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology. Prior to law school, Professor Lee worked as a Senior Program Manager at Microsoft.

Prof Christine Parker is a Professor of Law at Melbourne Law School, the University of Melbourne, and Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision Making and Society, where she leads the University of Melbourne node and two signature projects, the Australian Advertising Observatory, and the Automated Decision Making, Ecosystems and Multi-Species Relationships projects. Professor Parker is a socio legal researcher with a long career teaching and researching on lawyers’ ethics, business regulation, animal law, food law and policy, and the digital economy. Professor Parker’s books include The Open Corporation: Business Self-Regulation and Democracy; Explaining Compliance: Business Responses to Regulation, and influential text, Inside Lawyers’ Ethics.  Her paper with Dr Simon Coghlan on harm to nonhuman animals from AI published in 2023, was the first systematic framework for evaluating potential harms to nonhuman animals from the new generation of artificial intelligence.

President, SALDF

CJ is from Dublin, Ireland, and comes to animal law through an academic lens. He is the proud dog dad of a black and tan coonhound, Celia.

Vice President, SALDF

Emma DiGiovanni is a rising 2L at GW Law and is excited to serve as the Vice President of SALDF this year. She graduated from Cornell University, where she wrote her thesis on deceptive food labeling in the animal agriculture industry. Prior to attending law school, she worked at WilmerHale LLP as a Project Assistant and interned for an animal rights law firm based in California. Emma hopes to pursue animal law after law school and has a particular interest in advocating for stronger legal protections for factory-farmed animals.

Jamie McLaughlin is an animal law and environmental law attorney. She is the founder and president of Three Pearls Charities Inc., a nonprofit that addresses issues at the intersection of animal welfare, social justice, and the environment. Jamie has worked with the Animal Legal Defense Fund, the Humane Society of the United States, and other nonprofits. She is an associate attorney for the Nonhuman Rights Project. Jamie serves as a Vice Chair for the ABA ILS International Animal Law Committee and is a Vice Chair of the Missouri Bar Association Animal Law Committee. She received her JD with a Certificate in Public Interest Law from DePaul University College of Law in Chicago, Illinois. Jamie received both an animal law LLM and an environmental law LLM cum laude from Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, Oregon.

Jeff has been actively involved in supporting domestic and exotic animal welfare initiatives for the past 35+ years.

Following a 20+ year career in the communications department of an international aerospace company he chose to embark upon a path more closely related to his passion of animal advocacy.

This led him to a career at an AZA (Association of Zoos and Aquariums) accredited zoological facility as well as a GFAS (Global Federation of Animal Sanctuaries) accredited sanctuary.

His advocacy in support of animal welfare initiatives has been recognized by and reported in numerous media outlets, including TV, radio, and print, including Pulitzer Prize Winning journalist Thomas French's Book, Zoo Story: Life in the Garden of Captives.

In retirement, Jeff remains active in the field of animal welfare in supporting numerous animal welfare initiatives, including Producer/Director Michael Webber’s award-winning film “The Conservation Game”.

A significant part of Jeff’s current advocacy remains focused on assisting State and Federal wildlife law enforcement officials with investigations related to enforcement of the “Big Cat Public Safety Act”.

Jeff Sebo is Associate Professor of Environmental Studies, Affiliated Professor of Bioethics, Medical Ethics, Philosophy, and Law, Director of the Center for Environmental and Animal Protection, Director of the Center for Mind, Ethics, and Policy, and Co-Director of the Wild Animal Welfare Program at New York University. His research focuses on animal minds, ethics, and policy; AI minds, ethics, and policy; and global health, climate ethics, and policy. He is the author of The Moral Circle and Saving Animals, Saving Ourselves, and co-author of Chimpanzee Rights and Food, Animals, and the Environment. He is also a board member at Minding Animals International, an advisory board member at the Insect Welfare Research Society, an advisor at Eleos AI, and a senior affiliate at the Institute for Law & AI. In 2024, Vox included him on its Future Perfect 50 list of "thinkers, innovators, and changemakers who are working to make the future a better place."

Joan E. Schaffner received a BS in mechanical engineering (magna cum laude) and JD (Order of the Coif) from the University of Southern California and an MS in mechanical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Joan has taught Civil Procedure, Legislation and Regulation, Remedies, and Sexuality and the Law. Ze is the editor-in-chief of the American Intellectual Property Law Association Quarterly Journal.

Joan is the Faculty Co-Director of the GW Animal Legal Education initiative and advisor to the GW Animal Welfare Project and the GW Student Animal Legal Defense Fund. Joan’s scholarship focuses on animal protection law. Ze has presented on animal law panels and conferences worldwide. Joan’s most recent scholarship has focused on free-roaming cats with the recent publication in Society and Animals entitled "Managing Our Relationship with Free-Roaming Cats in Zoopoland,” and the development of an international convention for animal protection with the recent article published in the Global Journal of Animal Law, and co-authored with Raj Reddy, entitled "The Convention on Animal Protection: The Missing Link in a One Health Global Strategy for Pandemic Prevention.” Joan is the author of the book Introduction to Animals and the Law, co-author and editor of A Lawyer’s Guide to Dangerous Dog Issues and Litigating Animal Law Disputes: A Complete Guide for Lawyers, and author of several book chapters including "Valuing Nature in Environmental Law: Lessons for Animal Law and the Valuation of Animals” in What Can Animal Law Learn from Environmental Law?, "Animal Cruelty and the Law: Permitted Conduct” in Animal Cruelty: A Multidisciplinary Approach, “Value, wild animals and law” in Animal Welfare and International Environmental Law: From Conservation to Compassion.

Joshua C. Gellers, PhD, is a professor in the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at the University of North Florida, an expert with the Global AI Ethics Institute, and a member of the IEEE working group on design-centered human-robot interaction and governance. Josh’s research focuses on the intersection of environmental governance, rights, and technology. He has published over two dozen articles or chapters, edited a special issue of Earth System Governance on AI and digitalization, and written two books, The Global Emergence of Constitutional Environmental Rights (Routledge 2017) and Rights for Robots: Artificial Intelligence, Animal and Environmental Law (Routledge 2020). He is currently co-editing a unit on environments for the AI in Society series published by Oxford University Press and co-editing a volume on AI and environmental law for Edward Elgar. Josh holds a BA in political science from the University of Florida, an MA in climate and society from Columbia University, and an MA and PhD in political science from the University of California, Irvine.

karol orzechowki, Faunalytics' Resource Director, is a longtime animal advocate with a passion for animals, art, statistics, and tech. In addition to years of investigative work on factory farms, karol is the director of Maximum Tolerated Dose, a feature-length documentary about the psychological toll of vivisection on both animals and humans. He completed a Bachelor of Environmental Studies and an MA in Communications and Culture at York University, writing theses on nationalism and the Atlantic seal hunt, and Canadian rodeo culture, respectively. In 2023, karol lead the creation of Faunalytics' AI Policy, and for the past two years has been speaking on AI, Advocacy, and Strategy in the animal protection movement. When he's not working for Faunalytics, karol is the Board Chair of a non-profit independent news publication in his hometown. Outside of work, karol is often reading about computer hacking and infosec, organizing and performing at events in his local arts scene, or walking with Raoul the rescue dog.

Kathy Hessler is the inaugural Assistant Dean for Animal Legal Education at the George Washington University Law School (GW), and Director of the Animal Legal Education Initiative (ALEI), working with Joan Schaffner and Iselin Gambert, in a program made possible by generous support from ALDF.

Dean Hessler has been a clinical law professor for 30 years and has been teaching animal law for 22 years. She is the first law professor hired to teach animal law full-time. She received her JD from the Marshall-Wythe School of Law at the College of William and Mary and her LLM from Georgetown University Law Center. 

Dean Hessler helped develop the Center for Animal Law Studies at Lewis & Clark Law School (L&C). For fourteen years, she taught there and directed the Animal Law Clinic, which was named one of the top fifteen most innovative clinics in 2015. She also created and directed the Aquatic Animal Law Initiative and is the co-founder of World Aquatic Animal Day, along with Amy P. Wilson.
 

Laurel Palluzi is the founder of LAP Legal, LLC and Macadia Strategy Solutions, LLC, bringing over 15 years of expertise at the intersection of legal operations, technology transactions, and operational excellence. With a methodical approach to transforming operational challenges into strategic advantages, Laurel specializes in creating cohesive frameworks that drive business growth in technology environments.

Most recently, Laurel served as Director and Head of Legal at Solo.io, Inc., where she was the first legal hire. Her career includes strategic roles at Elastic, where she built and led the Legal Operations function from inception and managed technology transaction attorneys across the Americas. This experience expanded her expertise into complementary domains, including go-to-market strategies and information security processes.

Laurel's comprehensive understanding of operational interdependencies enables her to identify optimization opportunities that might otherwise remain hidden between departmental boundaries—a perspective particularly valuable in navigating AI implementation challenges.

She holds a BA, magna cum laude, from the College of New Jersey and a JD from the George Washington University Law School.

Laurel is a lifelong animal advocate and vegan of 14 years. She currently lives in Chicago with her husband and two cats, Cashew and Pistachio.

Noah Behrick builds trustworthy, rights-preserving AI where stakes are real. As AI Brains Product Owner & GenAI Advisor for the AI Lighthouse at Atlas Copco Group IT (Fortune 300 Swedish industrial engineering firm), he guides Atlas Copco brands—and select external organizations—in scaling proofs of concept into governed production systems. He leads AI Brains, a context-engineering and agent-development platform (MEAN on Azure) powering secure enterprise multi-agent architecture. A recognized leader in enterprise knowledge and information management, he architects lifecycles and retrieval/evaluation pipelines that keep knowledge accurate and auditable, while aligning vendor management with measurable outcomes. In sensitive domains, he emphasizes computer vision, rigorous data governance (provenance, minimization, chain-of-custody), and accountable AI (bias testing, explainability, telemetry), reinforced by privacy-by-design with PII masking and model-risk guardrails, aligned with GDPR, NIS2, and the EU AI Act.

As founder of Ark-N Technologies, Noah advances edge-AI pipelines on NVIDIA Jetson and secure local infrastructure, enabling offline inference with privacy-first handling and resilient sync in low-connectivity settings. A U.S. Army National Guard IT/network engineer by training, he bridges secure infrastructure with applied AI to turn promising models into reliable field tools. He studied Applied Data Science at MIT Professional Education and Cybersecurity & Information Assurance at Western Governors University.

Prof. Dr. Oliver Bendel holds an M.A. in philosophy and German literature, as well as a diploma in information science (Dipl.-Inf.-Wiss.) from the University of Konstanz, Germany. He wrote his doctoral dissertation around the turn of the millennium at the University of St. Gallen, focusing on chatbots, voice assistants, and early forms of social robots in learning environments. In 2009, he was appointed Professor at the FHNW School of Business in Switzerland, with campuses in Basel, Olten, and Brugg-Windisch. As a philosopher of technology, he explores the nature of machines – what they are, what they will become, and what they ought to be. His core fields of expertise include information ethics, machine ethics, and robot ethics. Since 2012, he has also conducted research in the areas of animal-computer interaction and animal-machine interaction, with a focus on animal-friendly robots and AI systems. A distinctive feature of his work as a philosopher of technology is his hands-on approach: together with his students, he develops concepts and prototypes to better understand the possibilities and limitations of emerging systems.

Rachel Pepper grew up in Montgomery County, MD, and has always loved animals. Rachel has been dedicated to animal rights since the seventh grade, petitioning to protest frog dissections at her school and working to combine her passion for animal activism with the law. She has been a member of SALDF since her 1L year, and served as co-president her 2L year.

Rebecca Critser is an Assistant Professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She works on the Toxicology Policy Program in the Environmental Health & Engineering Department as part of an interdisciplinary team that brings together lawyers and scientists to advocate for the advancement of New Approach Methodologies in order to improve public health and reduce the use of animals in science. She is actively involved in the American Bar Association Tort & Insurance Practice Section as a member of the editorial board of the publication The Brief and co-chairs of the Animal Law Committee’s Science & Technology and Policy & Alliances subcommittees. Rebecca teaches as an adjunct professor at IU Robert H. McKinney School of Law and Lewis & Clark Law School. She is an active member of the George Washington Law School’s Council on Animal Legal Education (CALE) and serves on the boards of the National Council for Research Ethics and Indiana State Bar Association’s Animal Law Section.

Ricardo Tieghi is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and works as a Scientific Program Analyst at Dynavet Solutions. Mr. Tieghi supports the replacement of animal research and testing at the National Institutes of Health Division of Program Coordination, Planning, and Strategic Initiatives, working alongside the Acting Deputy Director, Dr. Nicole Kleinstreuer. Mr. Tieghi has 4 years of experience integrating machine learning and AI into regulatory applications, from his research in academic labs to participation in large-scale federal projects at the NIH. He has received over 15 prestigious research awards for his work, including the Best Paper of the Year award from the Society of Toxicology's In Vitro and Alternative Methods Specialty Section. He leverages his position to integrate AI into regulatory policy and harmonize efforts that replace animal testing across all 27 NIH institutes.

Sam Tucker is the founder of Open Paws, an organization dedicated to building open-source AI tools that strengthen the global animal advocacy movement. Through Open Paws, Sam develops technology that helps activists and nonprofits work more effectively, from exposing factory farming practices to scaling compassionate campaigns.

He also co-leads the Code for Compassion Hackathon, a collaborative event that brings together developers, designers, and advocates to create innovative, AI-powered solutions for animals.

With a background in technology and a deep commitment to animal rights, Sam focuses on making powerful tools accessible to those driving change. His work is rooted in the belief that technology (when used thoughtfully and ethically) can accelerate the end of factory farming and create a kinder, more just future for all beings.

Sankalpa Ghose works at the intersection of bioethics and bioengineering. He is first author of “The Case for Animal Friendly AI” and is currently pursuing a PhD with Peter Singer at the National University of Singapore, Centre for Biomedical Ethics. He was a co-organizer of the AI for Animals Conference 2025 and helps lead OpenTelemed.org, An Art Company, and Like A Dog.

Dr. Shagun Krishna is the director of toxicology at the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, leading initiatives to implement human-specific test methods that replace animal testing. Collaborating with agencies like the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), NTP Interagency Center for the Evaluation of Alternative Toxicological Methods (NICEATM), U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), she advocates for non-animal research methodologies.

Prior to joining PCRM, Dr. Krishna worked at NICEATM on the Cardiovascular Health Effects Innovation Initiative, where she helped establish an AI-assisted pipeline for cardiovascular toxicology. Her work included interpreting high-throughput Tox21/ToxCast data, developing machine-learning models for hERG inhibition, connecting QSAR outcomes to cardiovascular risk, and mapping literature on environmental cardiac toxicants using PBPK and AOP frameworks.

Dr. Krishna earned a master’s in bioinformatics from Banaras Hindu University, India, and a PhD in Computational Biology and Cheminformatics from CSIR‑Central Drug Research Institute, India, focusing on cancer epigenetics. Dr. Krishna has been recognized with several awards, including the Lush Prize for Young Researchers, HESI Cardiac Safety Committee Early Career Seminar Award Series, and Computational Toxicology Specialty Section Yves Alarie Diversity Award for Trainees and Young Investigators by the Society of Toxicology (SOT). She is a passionate advocate for cruelty-free research.

Dr. Simon Coghlan is a moral philosopher and a veterinarian. He is the deputy director of the Centre for AI and Digital Ethics (CAIDE) and a senior lecturer in the School of Computing and Information Systems (CIS). Simon's research in digital ethics includes projects on companion and care robots for older people and other groups, animal-computer interaction, the anthropomorphizing of machines, and digital technologies in healthcare and public health. He has interests in applied ethics of various types, including conservation ethics, animal ethics, and bioethics.

Tony Eliseuson is the Litigation Program Director for the Animal Legal Defense Fund where he has the good fortune to work with an amazing team of nearly two dozen attorneys and professional staff in the Litigation Program, who file strategic high-impact lawsuits that enforce and expand protections for animals under the law.

Tony joined the Animal Legal Defense Fund in 2017 after a 15-year career as a litigation partner in the Chicago office of Dentons US LLP. While at Dentons, Tony worked on several pro bono cases with the Animal Legal Defense Fund, going back to the mid-2000s. Tony is an avid sports fan and (often very frustrated) golfer, and enjoys spending free time with his rescue buddy Darwin, a black lab plus who likes to think he is still a puppy.

Fai is a PhD student at the Centre for Biomedical Ethics at the National University of Singapore, focusing on the intersections between AI ethics, medical ethics, and animal ethics. Previously, he was a research associate with Professor Peter Singer, researching the impact and ethics of artificial intelligence concerning nonhuman animals. He planned and managed Peter Singer's 2024 speaking tour of China, as well as serving as his translator and advisor on academic issues in China. Prior to that, he was an AI ethics researcher under a grant awarded by Princeton University's Center for Human Values. He has also carried out research in the fields of animal welfare advocacy and effective altruism. He was a 2021 Foresight Fellow in Animal Ethics for Artificial Intelligence. Fai’s publications include “AI ethics: the case for including animals”, a pioneering paper co-authored with Peter Singer and published in AI and Ethics, a leading peer-reviewed journal in the field of AI Ethics.