Our Fellows
Learn More about the O’Shaughnessy Fellowships
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Dr. Sandro Luna
Dr. Sandro Luna is using the $100,000 fellowship grant to develop an application that measures vital signs and biomarkers exclusively from mobile device videos.
Dr. Sandro is a physician, founder, and health technology researcher who graduated from the M.D. / MBA program at Columbia University and the human biology honors program at Stanford University.
Over the course of his career, Dr. Sandro has developed non-invasive posture correction software, led multiple research trials in artificial intelligence and telehealth, and produced international films on health and wellness.
He is driven to build health technology that prevents people from becoming patients in the first place.
As the founder and CEO of Maiv Health Inc., Dr. Sandro is using his $100,000 fellowship grant to continue developing an application that enables anyone to measure clinically important data such as heart rate, blood pressure, and oxygen saturation using only their smartphone or mobile device. No sensors or other hardware will be required.
Keshav Sharma
Keshav is using the $100,000 fellowship grant to continue building an artificial intelligence & augmented reality platform that enables users to create, edit, and demonstrate 3D models at scale.
Keshav lives at the intersection of design, technology, and marketing. He has been creating and selling products since he first developed and sold a remote-controlled boat at the age of twelve.
Since then, Keshav has run a drop-shipping business, created a portal to help artists and creators showcase their work, and created an AI platform for food and fitness during his undergraduate degree in computer science.
Currently, as a co-founder and the CEO of Augrade Private Limited, Keshav is focused on empowering people with spatial computing and enhancing how we all live, work and play.
He is using his fellowship grant to continue developing an AI and AR platform that creates a 3D model from any input type and enables users such as architects and real estate developers to make real-time changes to the model using simple hand interactions. The platform will enable users to visualize data and materials and walk others through the space virtually.
Oghenekevwe Emadago
Oghenekevwe is using the $100,000 fellowship grant to continue researching and developing eco-friendly and cost-effective sanitary pads in Nigeria.
Oghenekevwe is an environmental activist, entrepreneur, and advocate for young women and girls. He has a background in physics and speaks four languages fluently.
His goal in life is to continue impacting his communities and raising investments to build impact-focused businesses that support local youths while championing climate action.
Over the past five years, he has worked closely with youths in remote villages in Nigeria, where he discovered the acute problem of period poverty affecting women and girls in their communities and the issue of plastic pollution from conventional sanitary pad use.
Oghenekevwe’s company, Girlified LTD, created the Girlified sanitary pad in 2022. It is made from banana fiber and natural cotton and is an eco-friendly and cost-effective alternative to conventional sanitary pads.
He is using his fellowship grant to continue researching and developing the Girlified sanitary pad, with the goal of reducing pollution and helping girls remain in school and carry out their daily activities.
Among other roles, Oghenekevwe is currently a member of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) and Chatham House’s Common Futures Conversations. He is also the regional director of the Naza Agape Foundation.
Kiubon Kokko
Kiubon is using the $100,000 fellowship grant to create a feature documentary about his father’s seven-hour swim from China to Hong Kong in 1973 in search of a better future.
Kiubon is most comfortable in an economy-class airplane seat, with his knees touching the back of his neighbor's chair.
Growing up in Columbus, Ohio, Kiubon wanted nothing more than to leave. So, he did.
After attending Claremont McKenna College in California, Kiubon spent nine months in the Sierra Mountains and four months on a hitchhiking adventure across Europe. He then moved to Hong Kong to unearth his roots, learn his mother tongue, and find home.
Now, Kiubon fundraises his salary, supports missionaries across Asia, makes movies, and tries not to let the wet market ladies scam him while buying cabbage. He is using his $100,000 fellowship grant to reconcile his broken relationship with his father by creating a feature documentary about his father's seven-hour swim from communist China to Hong Kong in 1973 and its lasting effects on his family.
Diana Hrisovescu & Shay McDonnell
Diana and Shay are using their $100,000 fellowship grant to develop Script, which aims to enable multilingual digital access to social welfare resources.
Diana and Shay are using their fellowship grant to develop Script. Script aims to enable a greater number of individuals to access social welfare resources and entitlements. It will help immigrants, refugees, asylum seekers, and minority groups access government support digitally, on a user-friendly platform, and in their native language.
Diana moved to Ireland from Romania aged 14. She learned English in only three months to help her brother access medical support.
Diana taught herself web development by building websites from the ground up and has taught children aged 7-18 how to code via the CoderDojo community. She is also a member of Teen-Turn, an organization aiming to provide teen girls with hands-on STEM experience.
She now attends Trinity College Dublin, where she studies Computer Science with Business.
Shay also attends Trinity College Dublin, studying Computer Science with Linguistics. He began programming aged 13 and, by leveraging online resources, gained experience developing various Android mobile apps, games, and websites. He joined Script as co-founder and lead technical engineer in April 2022.
Rohan Taori
Rohan is using the $100,000 fellowship grant to build flexible, accessible, and interactive foundational video and text-based AI models.
Rohan is a machine learning engineer who grew up in the Bay Area (he is also an avid Warriors fan!)
He is currently pursuing his Ph.D. at Stanford University, where he has trained AI models with synthetic data, tuned them to follow user instructions, and increased their reliability. Previously, he studied and taught computer science at the University of California, Berkeley.
Rohan is using his $100,000 fellowship grant to create flexible, accessible, and interactive AI models that can handle complex and diverse data. These models will be trained on large amounts of video data, empowering users to easily edit, generate, and reason about video content.
Isabella Teng & Varsha Raghavan
Isabella & Varsha are using their $100,000 fellowship grant to build an AI-powered next-generation video-production platform.
Rue connects emerging brands with casual event hosts, turning everyday gatherings into organic brand pop-ups. As an online marketplace, Rue seamlessly bridges the gap between brands looking to get their products in people's hands and hosts looking for unique products to enhance their events, whether it be dinner parties, yoga classes, celebrations, or any community gathering.
Isabella grew up in the Bay Area before studying and completing a B.S. in computer science at Yale. At Yale, she attended hackathons, programmed various mobile and web apps, TA-’ed CS courses, and conducted bioinformatics research. She has previously spent a month in Tel Aviv completing a data science fellowship and four months in Berlin working at an AI fintech startup.
Before co-founding Rue, Isabella was a fintech product manager working on real-time fraud detection models. She is also a photographer and painter.
Varsha has a keen interest in new technology and its sociological ramifications. As a high school student, she would spend days and nights fabricating hunks of metal into a 120-lb robot. She graduated with a B.S. in computer science from Yale, where she organized conferences on the ethics of AI and founded a licensed open-source web app called PPETrackr.
Before co-founding Rue, Varsha was a machine learning engineer at a drug-discovery startup. She used machine learning to identify novel gene therapies for oncology and published a paper on this work at the International Conference for Learning Representations. She is also a videographer and wildlife photographer.
Mykhailo Marynenko
Mykhailo is using his $100,000 fellowship grant to work on projects that combine technology, art, and human interaction.
Mykhailo is a software and hardware engineer from Ukraine. As well as being a keen researcher of security issues, he is passionate about building modern, collaborative, performant, scalable applications.
Mykhailo is using his $100,000 fellowship grant to work on projects that combine technology, art, and human interaction. One such project involves using AI and a custom-modified EEG headset to generate images from an artist’s brainwaves, thus developing new ways for artists to draw/visualize using visual cortex data.
Tony Morley
Tony Morley is using the $100,000 O'Shaughnessy Fellowship grant to fund research, communication, and innovation in progress studies.
Tony Morley is a progress studies writer and communicator specializing in the historical trends in global living standards and the forces that drive human progress and flourishing. His written work has appeared in TIME, Big Think, Freethink, The Progress Network, HumanProgress.org, and Quillette, among other publications.
Tony is using his fellowship grant to fund research, communication, and innovation in progress studies, including continuing his work on “Human Progress for Beginners,” the world’s first children’s book on progress, scheduled to be published with Pantera Press in Q4 of 2023.
Dr Alice Evans
Dr. Alice Evans is using the $100,000 O'Shaughnessy Fellowship grant to write the first-ever global history of gender.
Dr. Alice Evans is writing “The Great Gender Divergence” (forthcoming with Princeton University Press). This book will explain how the whole world became more gender equal, but why some countries are more gender equal than others.
To this end, she is studying the history of every single country and undertaking qualitative research in six continents. She is a Senior Lecturer at King’s College London and Visiting Associate Professor at Yale.
Nat & Martha Sharpe
Nat & Martha Sharpe are using the O'Shaughnessy Fellowship $100,000 grant to study and make documentary films of alternative childhood education schools.
Nat and Martha Sharpe have been a creative team for over a decade. Nat was a film school graduate and Martha a storytelling enthusiast. They fell in love while filming a musical parody of "Beowulf"with their friends.
After another comedy and two documentaries, they started having children. Focus shifted from art to survival. Even as struggling new parents, the Sharpes found small ways to keep creating and telling stories.
Together, they learned to code, got off food stamps, and traveled around America in an RV. Today, Nat and Martha homeschool their 5 kids and are eager to explore alternative education, expand their comfort zones, and—as always—make movies.
Nat and Martha are using their Fellowship (jointly) to investigate and document how we can prepare kids for a future where no career is safe. Is self-directed learning the answer? What happens when we let kids learn whatever they want? They will film and share the stories of the people who embody these questions.
Dr William Zeng
Dr. William Zeng is using the O'Shaughnessy Fellowship $100,000 grant to pursue open-source quantum computing.
Dr. William Zeng leads a quantum computing research group at Goldman Sachs and is founder and President of the Unitary Fund, a non-profit dedicated to developing the quantum ecosystem to benefit the most people. His research focuses on quantum computer architecture, algorithms and software.
He previously led initial development of Rigetti Computing's quantum cloud platform, and is co-inventor of the Quil quantum instruction language.
He received his PhD in quantum algorithms from Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar and his BSc. in Physics from Yale University. He was named to Forbes 30 under 30 in the Science category for his work on quantum computing.
Dr. Zeng is using his Fellowship to study how emerging quantum technologies can explore foundational questions in quantum mechanics. This next generation of experimental tests will probe fundamental aspects of nature, by considering what it means for something to be an observation / some-being to be an observer.
