Gillian Hadfield is an esteemed scholar who is recognized internationally for her pioneering research in technology, law, and institutional economics. She leads research that focuses on ensuring that artificial intelligence (AI) follows the ethical norms that allow human societies to thrive. 

Hadfield’s research approaches the AI alignment problem both in a technical sense, studying how to best build AI agents, and from a policy perspective, thinking about legal and regulatory structures needed to guide AI in valuable and not destructive directions. Hadfield believes that in order for AI to be beneficial to society, AI agents must be built to understand and respond to human normative systems, including both informal norms and formal systems of law. Motivated by a desire to introduce new ways of thinking about what AI alignment might mean, Hadfield works on computational models of human normative systems to ultimately enable AI systems that align with human normative institutions and reasoning. Hadfield’s work challenges conventional thinking about how legal rules are made and enforced, and she has become a leading voice in the call to redesign legal infrastructure to serve a globalized and digitally transformed society. 

Gillian Hadfield joined Johns Hopkins University as a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor in 2025 from the University of Toronto.