Lyla Renwick-Archibold

Building tools for impact in health, climate & agriculture.

I work on AI at the Gates Foundation, building and evaluating tools meant to do real good in the world.

↓ Scroll
Global health Climate adaptation Smallholder agriculture AI evaluation Digital literacy Cyber policy Global health Climate adaptation Smallholder agriculture AI evaluation Digital literacy Cyber policy Global health Climate adaptation Smallholder agriculture AI evaluation Digital literacy Cyber policy
01 — About
Lyla Renwick-Archibold
Lyla Renwick-Archibold

I'm interested in how tech systems can actually work for the people they're meant to serve, especially AI systems. I find myself constantly asking whether a given system should exist at all, and who it really serves.

Right now, I'm at the Gates Foundation building and evaluating AI tools for global health, climate, and agriculture. I come to this work with some skepticism: AI for social impact isn't a given, it's a series of choices. Before this, I was a research associate on the AI team at the Council on Foreign Relations, and I worked on cyber policy at the Atlantic Council, looking at how geopolitical competition shapes emerging technologies.

Earlier, I spent a year in Tanzania as a Princeton in Africa fellow, working on digital literacy and tech education. That experience still shapes how I think about most of this.

I studied computer science at Washington University in St. Louis, with a focus on where technology, policy, and equity meet. My work has cut across research and product roles in the public, private, and nonprofit sectors, including reporting on AI, surveillance, and human rights in East Africa as a researcher at Coda Media, and publishing on facial recognition and digital surveillance at the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project.

Outside of work, you'll usually find me behind a film camera, in the water surfing, watching documentaries, or deep in a historical fiction novel (shoutout to Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi).

02 — Now
Updated April 2026
What I'm doing now
Building
An editing tool for the Council on Foreign Relations editing style.
Reading
Atlas of AI by Kate Crawford.
Thinking about
What co-creation looks like in practice when building tech for maternal care.
Trying to
Travel less and write more.
03 — Selected Work

Things I've built
or helped build.

2026
CFR Style Guide Tool
Council on Foreign Relations
AI-powered editor that does light edits on writing for the Council on Foreign Relations, using the Publications-approved style guide as a knowledge base.
EDITTOOL
2026
Preeclampsia Risk Detection Chatbot
Health · Tooling
A conversational antenatal care tool that screens pregnant women for early signs and risk factors of preeclampsia and triages them to appropriate care.
HEALTHLLM
2025
Girls in STEM Program
PiAf Fellowship
Secondary-school program designed to encourage 100+ female students to participate in STEM.
EDUFIELDWORK
2023
FeedSTL
Washington University in St. Louis
Mobile app prototype to connect St. Louis residents with restaurants offering surplus food, improving access for food-insecure communities.
FOOD SECURITYTOOL
04 — Writing & Publications

On the page.

Reports, policy briefs, and the occasional opinion piece — mostly on evaluation, governance, and the gap between AI promises and AI practice.

2026
Mythical Beasts: Investigating the role of intermediaries in the proliferation of offensive cyber capabilities
Atlantic Council · Issue Brief
2025
Trump, Museveni and the anti-LGBT agenda
Coda Story · Explainer
2024
OP-ED: Facial recognition locked me out of my own apartment. NYS must ban it.
New York Amsterdam News · Opinion
05 — Contact

Say
hello.