About the Amaranth Foundation

The roadmap was supported by the Amaranth Foundation. The Amaranth Foundation is dedicated to funding high-impact, next-generation research, and has allocated $50M+ to ambitious research in NeuroAI and longevity since 2021. Our thesis is that NeuroAI is a differential path to safer AI that also benefits neuroscience and neurotechnology.

About the authors

Patrick Mineault leads the NeuroAI research roadmap at Amaranth. Patrick received his PhD in computational neuroscience from McGill University. He was previously a software engineer and data scientist at Google, a brain-computer interface engineer at Meta, and a staff scientist at Mila, the AI Institute.

Joanne Zichen Peng is a research director at Amaranth. A recipient of the Thiel Fellowship, she is a member of the Boyden lab at MIT and graduated from Princeton University.

Niccolò Zanichelli is a member of the technical staff at Amaranth. He is an undergraduate in computer science at the University of Parma in Italy, and previously co-founded OpenBioML.

Anton Arkhipov is an Investigator at the Allen Institute, where he leads the bio-realistic brain modeling group. He received his PhD in physics from UIUC and was previously a postdoctoral fellow at D. E. Shaw Research. He contributed to the biophysically detailed simulation section.

Eli Bingham is one of the founders of Basis, which is building next-generation cognitive architectures. He contributed to the cognitive architectures section.

Julian Jara-Ettinger is an Associate Professor of Psychology and Computer Science at Yale University. He contributed to the cognitive architectures section.

Emily Mackevicius is one of the founders of Basis, where she leads the Collaborative Intelligent Systems project. Her previous research at Columbia (Aronov lab) and MIT (Fee lab) uncovers brain mechanisms behind cognitive behavior in memory expert birds. She contributed to the cognitive architectures and loss functions sections.

Adam Marblestone is co-founder and CEO of Convergent Research, which creates Focused Research Organizations to unblock research bottlenecks by building scientific infrastructure. Previously he was a Research Scientist at DeepMind and Chief Strategy Officer of Kernel. He contributed to the loss functions section.

Marcelo Mattar is an Assistant Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at NYU. He contributed to the cognitive architectures section.

Andrew Payne is the CEO of E11 Bio, a Focused Research Organization building tools for connectomics. Previously, in the Boyden Lab at MIT, he developed methods for sequencing DNA inside intact cells and tissues using conventional light microscopes. He contributed to the biophysically detailed simulations section.

Sophia Sanborn co-leads the Enigma Project, a large-scale neuroscience project at Stanford University with the goal of uncovering principles of neural representation in brains and machines. She contributed to the sensory digital twins, embodied digital twins, and mechanistic interpretability sections.

Karen Schroeder is a research operations manager at Basis. She contributed to the cognitive architectures section.

Zenna Tavares is one of the founders of Basis. His research is centered on reasoning, modeling, and abstraction, synthesizing methods from programming languages, probabilistic machine learning, and cognitive science. He previously held an academic position at Columbia and earned his PhD from MIT. He contributed to the cognitive architectures section.

Andreas Tolias is a Professor of Ophthalmology at Stanford University, where he co-leads the Enigma Project. His work focuses on NeuroAI, combining large-scale neuroscience experiments with AI to uncover the principles of natural intelligence and reverse-engineer them to create AI systems that are smarter, more robust, trustworthy, and efficient. He earned his B.A. and M.A. in Natural Sciences from the University of Cambridge, his Ph.D. in Systems and Computational Neuroscience from MIT, and completed postdoctoral training in Neuroscience and Machine Learning at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany. He contributed to the sensory digital twins and embodied digital twins sections.


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