Our Team
Team
Speculative Technologies brings together people from a range of disciplines in academia, tech, policy, and beyond.
Interested in joining our team? See Open Positions here.
CEO
Ben Reinhardt
Program Lead
Will Vega-Brown
Will leads the Tooling-free Manufacturing program. He received a PhD in Robotics from MIT, where he worked on autonomous systems and motion planning. He is also a co-founder of Tagup, an industrial AI company. You can find him on LinkedIn.
Program Manager
Eileen Nakahata
Eileen manages the Brains Accelerator. Previously, Eileen helped run a climate grants program and led science communication for a national plant conservation program. She received an MBA and Masters of Environmental Management from Yale. You can find her on LinkedIn.
Special Projects Lead
Daniel Aziz
Daniel helps grow Spectech’s Brains Accelerator, partnerships efforts, and internal systems. He received a PhD in chemical engineering at Georgia Tech where he made low-cost silicon transistors. You can find him on LinkedIn.
Board and Advisors
Board of Directors
Kanjun Qiu
Kanjun is the co-founder and CEO of Generally Intelligent — an independent research company developing general-purpose AI agents. Previously, she started several companies and was an early employee at Dropbox.
Board of Directors
Adam Marblestone
Adam is the co-founder and CEO of Convergent Research — a non-profit that starts and runs Focused Research Organizations. Previously, he has worked on brain-computer interfaces, AI, and biophysics with some of the leading researchers in the field.
Advisor
Bridget Baumgartner
Bridget is the director of R&D at Revive and Restore, where she runs coordinated research programs to unlock conservation-focused science and technology. Previously, she worked in DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office.
Advisor
Eli Dourado
Eli is the head of strategic investments at the Astera Institute. Previously he worked at the Abundance Institute, Boom Aerospace, and the Mercatus Center.
Advisor
Sam Rodriques
Sam founded and runs the Applied Biotechnology Laboratory at the Francis Crick Institute. He also co-created Focused Research Organizations and invented new technologies for nanofabrication and bio-sensing.
Advisor
Sam Arbesman
Sam is the Scientist-in-Residence at Lux Capital, where he catalyzes ideas that are just on the cusp of possibility. He’s also a widely published writer and a Fellow at both the Silicon Flatirons Center for Law, Technology, and Entrepreneurship at the University of Colorado Boulder and the Long Now Foundation.
Advisor
Dan Brunner
Dan is a co-founder and former Chief Technology Officer of Commonwealth Fusion Systems. He now runs Future Tech Partners, a consultancy helping turn science fiction into reality.
Alumni
Program Lead
Quentin Dudley
Quentin led the Cell-Free Synthesis program. In the past, he worked at Calyxt on metabolite production and did a postdoc at the Earlham Institute. He has a PhD from Northwestern University, where he pushed the limits of cell-free protein synthesis. You can find him on Twitter or LinkedIn.
Program Lead
Michael Filler
Michael led the Nanomodular Electronics program. He is also an Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering at Georgia Tech where he works on nanoscale materials for electronics, photonics, and energy. He received a PhD in Chemical Engineering from Stanford University. You can find him on Twitter or LinkedIn.
Turn the impossible into the inevitable
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