SimPPL
Team

A small full-time team, a much larger network.

The active SimPPL team is small by design. Founders set direction; ML engineers build and ship the platforms; current interns rotate through research engineering. The board of directors keeps us honest. The alumni page lists those who have shipped with us since 2021.

Beyond the team listed below, we collaborate with folks (and their teams) at Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and NYU, including Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winners. The active team below is the small core that ships day to day.

Founders

Two co-founders.

Swapneel Mehta, Ph.D.

Swapneel Mehta, Ph.D.

Co-Founder and President

Postdoctoral Associate at Boston University and MIT Sloan. PhD in Data Science, NYU. Former visiting researcher at Oxford and Meta; engineering at Twitter, Adobe, and Slack. Atlantic Dialogues Emerging Leader; Belfer Fellow; Google Research Innovator.

mehtaver.se
Dhara Mungra

Dhara Mungra

Co-Founder and Treasurer

Co-founder and engineering lead. Former Data Scientist III at Bombora. M.S. Data Science, NYU. Inaugural fellow at the University of Mannheim Business School teaching AI & Entrepreneurship. CAIDP Fellow. Global Changemakers delegate at the Global Youth Summit.

Machine learning engineers

The team building Arbiter and Sakhi day to day.

Four ML engineers working across data services, NLP pipelines, infrastructure, and platform integrations.

Dev Bhut

Dev Bhut

Machine Learning Engineer

Owns Arbiter's data services and developer experience.

Utkarsh Verma

Utkarsh Verma

Machine Learning Engineer

Builds the platform that powers Arbiter's cross-platform investigations.

Atmik Shetty

Atmik Shetty

Machine Learning Engineer

Designs the LLM pipelines that surface narratives across X, Reddit, YouTube, and Telegram.

Varun Rajesh Nair

Varun Rajesh Nair

Machine Learning Engineer

ML systems work across the Arbiter and Sakhi stacks.

Current interns

Research engineers rotating through the lab.

Dhvani Shah

Dhvani Shah

Research Engineer Intern
Aditya Nair

Aditya Nair

Research Engineer Intern
Delisha Naik

Delisha Naik

Research Engineer Intern
Arhaan Godhrawala

Arhaan Godhrawala

Research Engineer Intern
Board of directors

Strategic direction and fiduciary oversight.

Dr. Mukund Sudarshan

Dr. Mukund Sudarshan

RL Researcher and Engineer, Anthropic
Christian Schroeder de Witt

Christian Schroeder de Witt

PI, Witt Lab, University of Oxford
Chirag Raman

Chirag Raman

Assistant Professor, Delft University of Technology
Sandra Khalil

Sandra Khalil

Partnerships and Trust & Safety Lead, All Tech is Human
Rebecca Harvey

Rebecca Harvey

Online Harms and Trust & Safety, FCDO (UK Govt.)
Karan Dhabalia

Karan Dhabalia

Serial Tech Entrepreneur (acq. by Stripe)
Mansi Panchamia

Mansi Panchamia

Developmental Consultant, World Bank
Stacey Peters

Stacey Peters

US Local News Leader, Advisor
Alumni network

64+ alumni and 5 research collaborators.

The full SimPPL alumni network is larger than this page. The 64 alumni on the alumni page agreed to share their current affiliation publicly; they are now at FAANG companies, in newsrooms, in graduate school, or building their own companies. 5 external faculty and senior researchers who lead or co-lead our projects are listed as research collaborators on the same page.

See the full alumni grid64 people on /alumni
Sameer Gupta
Deep Gandhi
Jay Gala
Aryan Makadiya
Yash Buddhadev
Kavish Shah
Mrunmayi Parker
Chaitya Shah
Aradhya Sakalley
Arpit Sharma
Hriday Ranka
Archit Rathod
And 52 more on the alumni page