Hi, I'm Isaak! I'm currently in a MS/PhD at MIT, exploring brain simulations as an alternative path to beneficial AI.
In the recent past:
- I skipped out of high school in rural Austria to graduate early
- In a gap year, I spun up a $1M non-profit and ran the most viral tech conference of the year, featuring Sam Altman, Daniela Amodei, 3Blue1Brown, Veritasium and more.
- Worked through 4000 papers and self-taught roughly an undergrad's worth of biology in a year, then cold-emailed myself into Oxford to do neuroimmunology
- Self-taught Mandarin in a year to fluency
- Got interested in math and did a math undergrad at Berkeley in two years
Some things I've recently been fascinated by: Brain simulations, sleepless mice, human wings & ornithopters, eradication of malaria.
I am grateful to be a fellow at Emergent Ventures, New Science, OSV, and VitaDAO. Among many individuals, I am endlessly indebted for the support of: Tyler Cowen, Ed Boyden, Sarosh Irani, mum, dad, AG, RA & RA, EM, TF, MP, ST. Thank you for raising my ambitions higher and then helping to reach for them together. Ad astra 🖤
freeman dot isaak [at] gmail dot com