Frank Ryan is a Senior Policy Advisor at Windfall Trust, where he has led several projects including the Windfall Policy Atlas and a forthcoming whitepaper proposing a global AI endowment.
His expertise centers on AI policy in developing economies. Prior to Windfall, he worked with GIZ to help build Togo's National AI Strategy. At The Future Society, he advised the United Nations, the OECD, the European Union, and U.S. agencies including USAID, the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Commerce, on open-source models, AI for the Sustainable Development Goals, and expanding access to AI in developing countries. He is the author of a widely referenced paper on the regulation of general-purpose AI and large language models under the EU AI Act.
Earlier in his career, Frank worked as a consultant at Sierra Leone’s Directorate of Science, Technology and Innovation, and researched China's transition to an innovation-driven economy as a research fellow at the United Nations Industrial Development Organization. He was a Research Assistant at the MIT Task Force on the Work of the Future, studying how firms retrain white-collar workers in response to automation, and began his career as a data scientist.
Frank is a member of the OECD.AI expert group on AI compute and the environment and a former member of the NIST AI Safety Institute Consortium's task force on risk mitigation for generative AI. He holds master’s degrees in Technology Policy from MIT and Computer Science and Philosophy from Durham University. He is fluent in Mandarin Chinese.
