Yan is an assistant professor in mathematics specializing in combinatorics at San Jose State University, after receiving his PhD from MIT. He wants to help people everywhere become more human and awesome. He has mentored students at the Mathematical Olympiad Summer Program (where he represented the U.S. at the International Mathematics Olympiad with a silver medal), RSI, and MIT-PRIMES. He received the Undergraduate Math Association’s Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Award for his postdoctoral position at UC Berkeley.

Hugh is a SPARC 2014 alumni. He is now a graduate student in game theory at Harvard University, where he studies how to use game theory to design better machine learning algorithms. In his spare time, Hugh enjoys writing, playing Go, and climbing buildings.

David did cancer research at Broad, data security research at Lincoln Lab and boutique security firms, and cybernetics research supported by individual grants. He cofounded New Science and spends much of his time striving to foster robust epistemic institutions. He enjoys being off-grid for extended periods.

Neel is an AI Interpretability researcher, currently taking a Sabbatical. He most recently worked at Anthropic on language model interpretability, and previously did research with DeepMind, UC Berkeley and the University of Oxford. Before this, he came top of his year in the Cambridge maths undergraduate degree, and earned two gold medals representing the UK in the International Maths Olympiad

Maria is a PhD student at Oxford studying political science, specialising in digital authoritarianism, the rise of the radical right in Europe and European tech policy. More broadly, she’s interested in axiology, epistemology and 20th century intellectual history. She also enjoys playing the piano, painting and travelling.

Damon is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, author of Pokemon Rational Fiction, and teacher at various camps and workshops. He’s a strong believer in the power of rationality to improve therapeutic practices, as well as stories as a catalyst for growth, and is working to combine all three in as many ways as possible.

Lulie was home-educated, and now lives in Oxford where she works on applied epistemology. Her main interests are philosophy, the psychology of how to get unstuck and flourish, non-coercive education and parenting, and art. She is currently in teacher training for Alexander Technique – an embodied mindfulness technique that has implications for rational thinking and enhanced agency.

Andy is a SPARC alum, and studied math at MIT. He enjoys being at the intersection of operational and technical problems, especially with poorly defined feedback loops. This has manifested in working at a few different startups in various generalist roles. He’s previously spent time exploring strategy games, astrophysics, and rock climbing.

David is currently doing research in scalable collaborative cultures – how we can design better ecosystems for humanity to solve some of the largest social-technical problems facing us today. In the past, he has spent 5 years in tech startups as a director of growth at one, and an anthropologist at another. He is currently interested in information theory, complexity theory, and philosophy.

Caleb graduated from Harvard with a degree in Comparative Literature and Linguistics, and has helped organize various conferences, camps, and workshops in different countries for the past few years. He is interested in comparative philosophy, ecological history, and cognitive linguistics. Caleb can speak English, French, and Chinese, grows most of the vegetables he eats, and enjoys Chinese tea.