I trained as a physician before moving into population health research. That shift is what led me to my current work as a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, where I study how social and economic policies shape health outcomes. The deeper I got into the research, the more I noticed that the fields trying to answer these questions often struggle with their own knowledge production and translation into policy. I want public health and medicine to engage with a wider range of ideas and get better at communicating tradeoffs and uncertainty to the public. Through this program, I want to explore how we can build better systems for generating and using public health knowledge.

I graduated in 2024 with a degree in chemical engineering and an understanding that global decarbonization will need more capable technologies than those available today. That left me with a nagging question: How does someone accelerate the rate of innovation? Realizing that policy is one possible answer, I moved from Los Angeles to Washington, DC, where I currently work as an analyst at the Breakthrough Institute, developing policies to advance energy and industrial innovation. My research and writing orbit my central belief that, by peeking inside the black box of innovation, we can make progress less serendipitous and more intentional.

I am a Renaissance Philanthropy, Emergent Ventures, and OSV fellow who spent the past decade developing drugs to treat chronic diseases of aging. I was an early hire at Gordian Bio, a longevity startup in the Bay, before leaving to found a Focused Research Organisation (Artemis) that failed. I took those learnings and networks to then develop a new philanthropic initiative for chronic pain classification. I write about my personal experiences around philanthropic initiatives and fundraising on my Substack.

I’ve always been interested in history and political institutions, originally wanting to pursue a career in academic philosophy researching democratic theory, political philosophy, and legal theory. Law school seemed more immediately feasible, though, and so it’s been extra exciting to find a path into the think tank and policy world — working on education policy — that allows me to make the most out of my philosophical and legal roots.

Jacob Bruggeman is an incoming assistant professor at the Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society at The Ohio State University, where his research examines the entangled histories of technology, politics, and American institutions. He completed his PhD in history at Johns Hopkins University, where his dissertation, Computer Hackers and the Remaking of Modern American Political Order, offers the first historical account of hacking in the United States. He serves as co-principal investigator on an NSF-funded project on the history of professional ethics codes in computer science. His academic work was most recently published in Modern American History and by the MIT Schwartzman College of Computing.

I help run Diff Jobs, The Diff’s recruiting arm, placing our readers at 50+ AI-native application layer startups, neolabs, and financial firms that buy businesses and rebuild them around AI. I started in mid-2024, weeks before o1 shipped, so I’ve seen how AI progress has repriced different flavors of labor in real time. Two questions have fallen out: 1) what is the current human-machine exchange rate in a given domain, and how is it changing? And 2) how can we use machine intelligence to better select for/develop/reach the human intelligence a domain actually requires? Answering these questions requires a deep obsession with understanding what makes people special. Beyond talking to 10+ talented people (e.g, engineers, founders, investors, academics) every week, I spend hours consuming personal websites, blogs, LinkedIn/X profiles, resumes, Github projects etc. to understand people’s unique intellectual synesthesia and what makes them tick.

I am a cultural commentator, law school graduate, and education policy advocate and cofounder of the Education Progress organization. Previously, I wrote about topics from the FAA’s hiring scandal to institutional capture at Wikipedia. I aim to be a chronicler of the institutional crisis, focusing particularly on education out of a conviction that the field has built on shaky-to-impossible foundations for generations and urgently needs to focus on raising the ceiling and teaching people to their level. We all benefit from institutions that make it easy to develop expertise and virtue.

I’m a former video game developer (15 years), and now I work in the field of housing economics, property tax policy, and empowering the civil service through open source software and transparent data reporting. The bottom line is that land is a big deal, housing could be much cheaper, and putting stuff on a map is often the most effective way to make an argument.

I’m fascinated by where culture and politics meet. I founded and edit ævum, a German-language magazine about political ideas, and work at Prometheus, a Berlin-based think tank. Before that, I studied philosophy and mathematics and worked in politics for a while. On Substack, I will write about European culture and progress: I want to understand why Europe distrusts progress and where its technopessimism comes from. So I go looking for the origins: the Romantics, German and French philosophy, the 1970s Greens, and today’s New Right. At the core are ideas about meaning, nature, markets, and artificiality, which I want to explore with progress in mind.

I’m finishing a PhD in Environmental Sciences at the University of Guelph. I study plant production in controlled environments (greenhouses and vertical farms) for food and medicine. I am also interested in space agriculture and was a member of the finalist team in the Canadian Space Agency’s Deep Space Food Challenge, where we designed and built a crop production system for the Moon and Mars. I will be exploring frontier crop production in controlled environments for cities and space. These technologies will help us grow more and better food with fewer inputs and impacts, be it Manhattan or Mars.

I’m Head of Sales at Lighthouse, where we help frontier talent navigate US immigration. I spend all day talking to technologists who want to build the future in the US. When they do, their contributions enrich the rest of us.

Smart immigration would attract people with the skills the US needs, while earning the trust of the American people. Current policies do neither.

To rebuild our immigration system, we need a new national consensus on the role immigration should play in the US.

I write to play my part in forging this consensus, providing historical context on talent movement from the perspective of someone in daily conversation with the people and companies navigating global mobility.

I am an electrical engineer, a power systems graduate student, and an all-around energy nerd. I use my blog to explore the technical, political, and economic constraints that shape the energy landscape. In this program, I will be exploring the energy trilemma: how can we cost-effectively and reliably power a growing civilization without destroying the planet in the process?

I’ve spent my career working at the intersection of technology and ideas. Our tools are improving exponentially, but our philosophy is lagging behind. I advocate from a deep love for humanity, including the recognition that building technology is among the highest expressions of our minds. I primarily explore how AI can be used to improve our creative expression and enhance our lives, and secondarily, how those building and using it must remain free to do so.

I’m an ag-engineer-turned-economist and an assistant professor of agricultural policy at North Dakota State University, where I research how markets, policy, and climate shape the future of agricultural production and the environment. Prior to moving to North Dakota, I built carbon accounting protocols for biomass-based carbon removal at Isometric, a climate-tech startup.

I write about the big political economy dynamics and tiny policy minutiae that drive which crops get planted and what biomass gets allocated to which uses. Thinking out loud on how society can best pursue abundant and sustainable bioenergy.

Inferential Gap takes its name from the idea of inferential distance: the background concepts and context two people need to share before they can understand one another. This blog seeks to help bridge the inferential gap between the Chinese and western AI ecosystems.

I’ve spent most of my career working in China’s AI sector. I’ve also lived and worked outside China. I draw on this experience to write about AI governance and safety in China, as well as pathways for Sino–US cooperation to address shared AI risks.

My motivation comes from the linguistic and information asymmetries that limit western understanding of China, and from the potential stakes of misreading Chinese approaches to AI.

I am passionate about building more habitat for both people and wildlife, because human progress has always depended on nature, yet we have also burned through our natural capital stocks to produce that progress, jeopardizing future human thriving. How can we better balance the health of nature with human needs and wants? Searching for answers to these questions, I left a tenured professorship, worked at nature/climate startups for several years, and am now at a market-oriented environmental think tank, the Property and Environment Research Center. I will be thinking and writing about this interlocking set of topics, from the links between our economy, happiness and the environment, to permitting reforms that can actually work for both nature and people, to the best ways to deal with nature-based risks like wildfire and sea level rise.

After I graduated with a government degree from Harvard College, I realized that most people who enter our systems of government are not trained for that work. This was triply true of New York City and State. So I started a civics school (Maximum New York) after years of independent study and practice, and I’ve since taught hundreds of students inside and outside of government. I see the difference that a rigorous foundation makes on a daily basis, so I’m going to write about past and present success stories in going further, faster in politics. This writing will include how to be a better partisan and party member, and what a “good partisan” looks like. New York and America need better partisans.

Policy researcher. Local elected. State appointee. Federal civil servant. Urban planner. Civic tech entrepreneur. I’ve pursued a career looking at American government from almost every angle, and the result is a fascination with the history and variety of ways to run cities. My blog will explore this diversity and chart a path to better policy outcomes through better design of public institutions.

I research how America and China distinctly build and govern technological power. I studied Chinese in university and did intensive language training in Beijing, surrounded by China’s increasingly sophisticated parallel modernity. Then, I studied at Oxford, seeing firsthand the consequences of deindustrialization and stagnation. Through all this, my research started with industrial strategy and base materials and moved toward China-focused AI governance. Chinese and American strategies for industrialized intelligence will be the primary determinants of future progress. I recently graduated and currently work as a Research Fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation in Washington, DC.

I’m a think tank researcher covering immigration and Western Hemisphere policy, as well as a contributing writer at The Dispatch and a 2026-2027 Novak Journalism Fellow with The Fund for American Studies. I also write Points of Entry, a newsletter on migration data.

For the fellowship I’ll focus on the relationship between immigration and industrial policy, as well as the impact of technology on assimilation.

For over ten years, I have been working on bringing better housing and transportation options to the place where I live. I started with my neighborhood, then my city, and finally my state. My writing is informed by this advocacy – I aim to change policies to make Los Angeles a more welcoming and just city.

In my past academic life, I studied the philosophy of education and ed policy at Teachers College, Columbia University. Now, I’m a mother of 4 and a gifted education advocate in residence at GT School, which offers unlimited academic acceleration and fluff-free life skills development to high-ability K-8 learners.

I write Above Grade Level, focusing on simple academic acceleration: some 1/3rd of kids in a typical age-based classroom are already working beyond grade level! Letting this relatively large cohort of advanced students move at the pace of their actual readiness is the cheapest, most available talent development lever that we refuse to use.

I’m Operating Partner at the Africa Jobs Fund, a philanthropic investor/venture-builder focused on building high-impact companies in export manufacturing and international labour mobility to create higher-productivity jobs for low-income workers in Africa.

I write about economic growth, export manufacturing, labour mobility, AI in the developing world, business building, investing, and much more!

I previously started a leading recruitment agency for startups in Africa and led product/growth at an African logistics-tech startup.

Energy abundance and climate underpins a lot of civilizational capabilities and the quality of life and yet they currently appear to be in conflict. This fascinated me for over a decade and got me deep into market incentives, societal structure and the policies that shape both. I’ve been exploring where science and engineering progress comes from in the field, how they get funded and the successes and pitfalls of different funding mechanisms and their specific organizations. I’ve worked at big tech companies, a research lab, started a startup and sit on the boards of for and non profits.

I’m a climate tech writer and landscape photographer. I’ve worked on the comms team for Planet, a satellite data provider, and Pacific Fusion, a nuclear fusion startup. I currently work as an in-house writer for Lowercarbon Capital, a VC fund investing in hardtech companies. My work and artistic practice attempt to answer one question: can we achieve progress without destroying Earth in the process?

I’m an Equipment Engineer at Tokyo Electron, where I work on semiconductor manufacturing equipment at the Albany NanoTech Complex. Working inside one of the world’s leading semiconductor ecosystems sparked my interest in the industrial systems that drive technological progress. My writing focuses on semiconductors, advanced manufacturing, AI infrastructure, and the often-overlooked companies that make innovation possible. I enjoy explaining complex technical topics in an accessible way while highlighting the people, technologies, and supply chains that underpin long-term economic growth.

I previously worked on AI and science policy in the Senate and for the White House and Federal Agencies. I followed my curiosity about how we advance & govern risky technologies to China and then to the finance team of a quantum computing company. I’m now exploring the question: if AI is accelerating R&D, how do we adapt science and technology governance to keep pace? That may mean innovating on private governance, building federal capacity, and testing governance regimes at the state level.

I work on NeuroAI, bringing neuroscience insights to AI and using AI to accelerate neuroscience. When I was doing a bachelor’s in math and physics, I picked up a little book called Eye, Brain and Vision from David Hubel; it set me on a windy path to figure out how the brain makes sense of the world. I completed a PhD in neuroscience at McGill, worked in industry on data science, brain-computer interfaces, and foundation models for neuroscience, and am now funding frontier research at the Amaranth Foundation.

I lead Coefficient Giving’s grantmaking at the intersection of AI, global health, and economic growth. I also write about these topics as a freelance journalist in outlets like The Economist, Scientific American, and National Geographic, and on my Substack, Under Development.

I plan to work through the potential global impacts of AI on everything from export-led growth pathways to medical diagnosis and how we should respond.

Before CG, I was a consultant at McKinsey, where I advised public health agencies on COVID-19 crisis response, as well as pharmaceutical and biotech firms. I graduated from Yale with a BA in Ethics, Politics, and Economics.

I waited tables for six years at $2.13 an hour, then spent a decade as a U.S. diplomat. Now I research AI risk and run DC Abundance, a 500-person policy network.

Almost everyone in these fights wants the greater good. But most fights are trade-offs, and trade-offs go to whoever is organized. That is rarely the people with the least money. In many states, existing health clinics can veto new ones. Rules like this are why housing, independent clinics, and daycare are scarce.

I write about these frictions. They are easy to overlook, which is why forecasts about new technology run too rosy and too dire. They are also what we can fix.

I’m a scientist at the Wyss Institute, working on solving aging. I did my PhD at Harvard, where I discovered new ways to reverse the age of cells and extend lifespan in mice. I got into the field after realizing aging is one of the largest biological limits we have, and one that we take for granted. Having studied it for the past 9 years, I can convey both the excitement of the progress we’re making and the realistic view that we need far more resources aimed at what is arguably the biggest unsolved problem in biology.

I want to explore two things: the cutting edge of longevity research, and the philosophical implications of a life where aging is optional. They matter because the first offers a grounded, trustworthy path to biological agency, while the second paints the better future that makes the effort worth it.

I’m a postdoc at the Salk Institute studying T cells, circadian rhythms, and cancer immunotherapy. I did my undergrad, master’s, and PhD at the University of Cambridge. After ten years in the UK, I was desperate to move somewhere where ambition was more culturally celebrated. I’ve now been in San Diego since January 2025. I love the idea of academic research, and I love many facets of it in reality too, but my firsthand experience has also left me somewhat jaded. I have written previously about the perverse incentives that drive someone to do a PhD, the problems with traditional academic publishing, how the hiring process for wet-lab scientists is not fit for purpose, how bias seeps into academic research at every layer, and more. During the BBI, I wish to explore meta-scientific topics more deeply, focusing on the future of human talent. For example, how will incoming advances in robotics alter the structures and incentives within academic labs?

As a law student, I started working on permitting policy and writing amicus briefs at the Foundation for American Innovation; the work of which led me to become fascinated by the impact of AI on the practice of law, particularly how AI can be incorporated to reduce transaction costs in contracting to improve growth. On the side, I also help out with the Federalist Society’s AI and Law Initiative.

My interest in climate change led me to study and get involved in power markets. Now, I’m a power market forecaster trying to understand energy systems and help finance renewables.

Economic growth is important for leading better lives. India is only at lower-middle-income status. These two facts got me interested in the mechanics of how progress happens. I want to explore how effective regulation design helps countries break out of the mold and join the ranks of rich countries.

I’m an analyst at the Breakthrough Institute, an energy-focused think tank with offices in Berkeley and DC. In a previous life, I lived in China and traveled all over the country working as a freelance journalist. What unites my past and my present is a desire to investigate hidden structures and tell compelling stories about why our world is the way it is.

I completed a PhD in the history of law during the Industrial Revolution in 2025; I then trained as a mathematics teacher in 2026 and saw the extraordinary problems with the British education system. I now teach law and philosophy at two Scottish universities and see similar decline. This is what got me interested in improving educational standards in Britain and America.

I’m a homeschooling dad working to create an education that allows my kids to advance the frontier of their potential. In the past, I was a Naval Aviator, developmental test pilot, quantum computing engineer, startup operator, and entrepreneur, but I left all of them to start homeschooling my two kids. I bring a focus on expertise studies and my experience mastering the domains I have into writing about education as a human potential problem.

I’ve been interested in the intersection between science and society since my undergraduate days, studying genetics and learning about the complex tradeoffs of modern agriculture, GMOs, and human genomics. This led to me studing for my PhD in Evolutionary Biology, writing essays for Asimov Press and Works In Progress, and to my current job analysing the potential impacts of emerging technologies.

I enjoy writing fiction as much as essays, and am interested in better understanding how the stories we tell ourselves about the future influence tech adoption and societal change.

I’m a PhD economist focused on housing. I aim to clear up housing debates through rigorous economic thinking. I became interested in housing while living in Vancouver, seeing both skyrocketing housing prices and supply-and-demand denialism in the public debate.

Peggy Yin is a PhD student at Stanford, director of the Cognitive Security Task Force, and a board member at LearnerStudio. She designs and studies transformative experiences, particularly in education and workforce development. She has led the development of social impact technologies at MIT Media Lab, Teach For America, and Ars Electronica, and has been featured in Fast Company’s World Changing Ideas, the Wall Street Journal, SXSW, Carnegie Hall, BBC Radio, MIT Museum, and the United Nations. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa and cum laude from Harvard University, where she studied computational neuroscience and art history.

Biotechnology Innovation for Public Health

Hello! I’m a pandemic preparedness policy practitioner, epidemiologist, and health system researcher. I became interested in the intersection of biotechnology innovation, pandemic preparedness, and public health during my PhD studies, which overlapped with the COVID-19 pandemic.