Jessie Dong

Jessie is a junior majoring in Computer Science. 

She believes her life’s work is to play an active role in the most significant shift in modern history, surpassing the dot-com era and the rise of mobile computing, with AI at its core. Jessie has focused much of her time working on the infrastructure and systems engineering behind AI products, but she believes there is growing complexity and importance in the ethics and societal impact space as the general public moves from passive users of AI to active stakeholders in how these systems are designed and governed. She believes it would be shortsighted to focus solely on technical development when even companies that are pioneering frontier AI are increasingly recognizing that public trust, security, and privacy are core to real-world adoption, as reflected in the creation of dedicated societal impact and alignment teams. 

Jessie previously worked on embedded systems software at Tesla and interned at Mithril, an AI infrastructure startup backed by Sequoia, Lightspeed, and NVIDIA. She worked on a long-horizon memory deep research agent for unstructured data and on a cross-platform application that connects content across tools, both of which surfaced persistent questions around privacy, security, and ethical responsibility in system design. Jessie sees the McCoy Tech Ethics Center as a strong place to think critically about ethics, security, and societal impact in modern technical systems.