Dr Wm. Matthew Kennedy joins Syntony
Matt joins as Head of Research Strategy and Evaluations, guiding Syntony’s research priorities, evaluation methods, and academic collaborations.
Syntony welcomes Dr Wm. Matthew (Matt) Kennedy as Head of Research Strategy and Evaluations. Working with founder Nathan Heath, Matt will help set the firm’s research priorities across AI evaluation and red teaming, support study design and publications, and develop academic research partnerships.
Matt brings a research agenda centered on a practical question: how should we evaluate AI systems, and what can those evaluations tell us? His work spans technical AI governance, evaluation and red teaming methods, and the foundations of evaluation as a discipline.
Research experience across disciplines
Matt is also an AI+ Senior Research Fellow at King’s College London. Before joining King’s, he was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute. He has worked in industry in UX/UI research and AI evaluation.
He holds a master’s degree from the University of Oxford and a PhD from the University of Sydney (2017), where his doctoral research examined the history of colonialism and international law.
His research also examines AI’s role in education, legal reasoning, and knowledge production. That breadth is valuable to Syntony’s work with organizations whose decisions depend on understanding both a system’s behavior and its consequences for people.
Building on an established collaboration
Matt and Nathan already work together as co-founders of The AIHL Project, a separate collaborative initiative examining AI and international humanitarian law. Their joint work includes MAESTRO4IHL, a threat model for synthetic media harms to prisoner-of-war protections.
At Syntony, Matt will help guide research affiliates and strengthen the connection between rigorous study design, adversarial testing, and the evidence organizations need to act.
