William Hohnen-Ford

Billy is currently a Research Assistant at the Design Bioethics Lab within the Neuroscience, Ethics & Society (NEUROSEC) research group. He has an interdisciplinary background spanning Cognitive Science, Ethics and Policy.

He earned his undergraduate degree from University College London (UCL), where he concentrated on Neuroscience, Philosophy, and Policy. Billy's academic focus revolved around the ethical implications of using developmental neuroscience on poverty and inequality research to guide socioeconomic policy.

Subsequently, he completed an MSc in Cognitive and Decision Sciences, honing his skills in quantitative approaches to cognitive science, including Machine Learning, functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), and Neural Computation. His thesis web-scraped a longitudinal sample of over 13 million Reddit posts, identifying changes in valence, arousal, and religious/mystical language in posts from approximately 20,000 users before and after psychedelic experiences. 

Billy has also interned at The Constitution Unit where he worked in the analysis team for The Future of Democracy in the UK projects. 

In his current work, Billy studies the societal effects of AI chatbots on adolescents, including their potential roles in political polarisation, emotional dependence, and social development. He also develops LLM-based research tools and experimental platforms designed to study these effects in real-world settings, and to inform ethical design.