Our Fellows

Wang will continue to develop 3D-printed magnets. She aims to improve manufacturing methods by enabling faster, low-waste magnet production and the creation of novel magnetic structures. A 3D-printed magnet would represent one of the most significant leaps in magnetic technology in more than 40 years and enable a range of new technologies, research projects and business opportunities.

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An electrical engineering graduate from the California Institute of Technology, Wang is an experienced engineer who has helped build items such as prostheses and underwater robots. She began researching new ways to create magnetic materials in 2023 after leaving her engineering job to research power grid issues independently. In January 2024, she received a fifteen-week Brains Fellowship from the nonprofit research organization Speculative Technologies (founded by OSV Advisory Council member Benjamin Reinhardt), where she developed a research proposal and began conducting experiments in her home laboratory.

Together with his team (Bhaumik Patel and Anirudh Kannan), Forster will build a research resource that enables business leaders to scale their companies by better understanding the expertise of their top performers. He will also develop a software tool that dramatically improves the speed and ease of conducting expertise research.

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Forster has previously worked closely with the renowned CEO and executive coach Matt Mochary, including as Mochary’s chief of staff. In this role, Forster worked with and built knowledge products for founders and CEOs of some of the United States’ best-known companies. These experiences enabled him to study how experts learn and operate and taught him that much of the world’s most important knowledge is tacitly held.

Davis will continue to design, develop and bring to market an affordable prosthetic hand, incorporating his engineering expertise and real-world experience as an amputee, to improve upon currently available devices. He intends to offer the device as an assembly-required DIY kit, enabling users to assemble, fit and repair it independently.

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Davis is a self-employed product design engineer with 28 years of experience operating a fabrication and machine shop in Oregon. In 2019, Davis had four fingers on his left hand amputated but was unable to find a prosthetic device that fully met his needs. That experience set him on a mission to build a device of his own, and Davis has been documenting his progress on YouTube ever since.

Dean will continue to develop Essay Architecture: a 27-point framework, based on hundreds of classic essays that Dean is deconstructing, which will serve as the foundation for a textbook and an AI-powered editing tool. Dean will finish writing the Essay Architecture textbook before switching focus to the AI-powered editing tool, which will instantly generate an in-depth report based on any draft the user uploads—identifying both strengths and weaknesses, as well as providing stylistic and structural feedback.

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An architect by training, Dean has spent the past four years obsessively reading, writing, and editing essays. Now, with Essay Architecture, Dean is combining his passions in order to uncover the secret architecture of great essays.

Dr. Elgabry is an entrepreneur, scientist, and athlete on a lifelong mission to understand the relationship between technology and health. She holds a Ph.D. in biotechnology from University College London and an M.Sc. in Theoretical Systems Biology from Imperial College London, and was previously a Fellow at Johns Hopkins University and Cyber Fellow at Yale University.

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As an inventor and researcher, Dr. Elgabry has both entrepreneurial and academic expertise, with a patent and publication record from award-winning projects at AstraZeneca and Microsoft. 

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Dr. Elgabry is founder and CEO of the cyber-biosecurity company Bronic, where she is combining her expertise in biotechnology with her passion for running track in order to transform how individuals interact with their health, while her research on the future of biotechnology has been recognised by the UK Parliament Joint Committee on National Security and the United Nations.

Carman has been fascinated with filmmaking since his childhood. He started creating short films at age nine. He experimented with visual effects throughout his teenage years, winning Best Visual FX at the 2016 All-American High School Film Festival among thousands of other entrants. Carman’s prize for winning in this category included a four-year scholarship to the University of Advancing Technology in Arizona. However, he declined this offer to pursue filmmaking full-time instead of attending college.

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Since leaving school, Carman has directed and produced music videos, worked on creative commercial editing and production for video games, and led content and digital strategy at Astranis Space Technologies Corp., which aims to provide affordable internet to underserved populations.

Seyfried is a multidisciplinary interaction designer whose research focuses on leveraging living systems and the natural world to develop sustainable data storage technologies.

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She is the co-founder of the Grow Your Own Cloud initiative, which is developing clean data solutions via DNA data storage in plants. Grow Your Own Cloud was awarded the Science Breakthrough of the Year 2022 Award by the Falling Walls Foundation and was a winner of the 2019 United Nations Unite Ideas Circular Economy Challenge.

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Seyfried’s work has been recognized by organizations such as the World Economic Forum and the World Government Summit.

Curt Jaimungal, a Toronto-based mathematical physicist, hosts the acclaimed podcast "Theories of Everything," which fuses rigorous scientific analysis with profound philosophical inquiry.

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This podcast challenges the frontiers of conventional knowledge, engaging with complex theories across quantum mechanics, consciousness, artificial intelligence, and cosmology.

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Curt illuminates intellectual terrains by uncovering the intricate hidden connections between disparate fields within science, within spirituality, and between them.

Based in India, Justh is a singer-songwriter creating original Hindi songs with poetic lyricism as their backbone. He has a unique songwriting style and is focused on creating beautiful and fresh pieces of art for the world.

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He qualified as a chartered accountant and worked as an auditor at KPMG, but his instinctive interest in melodies and poetry led him to music. He has performed live in India and the United States.

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Connor is a linguist, programmer, and author with a lifelong fascination with languages. He spoke seven languages by age 25.

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Connor’s interest in language and technology led him to the world of AI. Connor taught himself to code and has built many pieces of AI language technology. In 2017, he wrote “Siri in the Uncanny Valley,” a book exploring linguistic problems in voice technology.

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In 2023, Connor began his project to preserve endangered languages using large language models. The world loses dozens of languages every year due to the increased dominance of major languages like English, Spanish, and Mandarin. Connor believes that losing a language is akin to losing an entire culture and its history. He decided to focus first on preserving Navajo, a historically important and linguistically fascinating language with an estimated 170,000 native speakers in the United States. 

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Outside of work, Connor has been a semi-professional skateboarder and has lived in ten countries.

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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.

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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.

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He is driven to build health technology that prevents people from becoming patients in the first place.

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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 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.
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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.
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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 is an environmental activist, entrepreneur, and advocate for young women and girls. He has a background in physics and speaks four languages fluently.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 is most comfortable in an economy-class airplane seat, with his knees touching the back of his neighbor's chair.

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Growing up in Columbus, Ohio, Kiubon wanted nothing more than to leave. So, he did.

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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.

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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 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.

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Diana moved to Ireland from Romania aged 14. She learned English in only three months to help her brother access medical support.

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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.

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She now attends Trinity College Dublin, where she studies Computer Science with Business.

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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 is a machine learning engineer who grew up in the Bay Area (he is also an avid Warriors fan!)

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 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.

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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 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.

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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 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 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.