Contributors

Niccolo Zanichelli

Independent

Italian AI researcher serving as Member of Technical Staff at the Amaranth Foundation, focusing on NeuroAI for AI safety. Co-founding OpenBioML, an open-source computational biology initiative. 2024 Foresight Institute Fellow working at the intersection of machine learning, computational biology, and neuroscience. Co-author of the "NeuroAI for AI Safety" roadmap.

Maximilian Schons

MxSchons GmbH

Maximilian Schons, MD, is the project lead for The State of Brain Emulation Report 2025. His research consultancy focuses on responsible innovation at the intersection of biotech and AI. He has held senior positions in German medical research consortia and served as Chief Medical Officer for life-science startups. More at mxschons.com

Isaak Freeman

MIT Synthetic Neurobiology Group

Austrian-born MS/PhD student at MIT in Ed Boyden's Synthetic Neurobiology Group, researching engineering sleep and brain simulations. Completed Applied Mathematics at UC Berkeley in approximately two years. Self-taught undergraduate biology through 4,000+ research papers. Founded a $1M nonprofit and organized "Future Forum" featuring Sam Altman and Daniela Amodei.

Anton Arkhipov

Allen Institute

Investigator at the Allen Institute since 2013, building biophysically detailed computational models of brain circuits. Led a team creating one of the world's most detailed virtual brain simulations on Japan's Fugaku supercomputer—modeling nearly 10 million neurons and 26 billion synapses across the entire mouse cortex. Developed the Brain Modeling ToolKit (BMTK).

Philip K. Shiu

Eon Systems

Philip Shiu, PhD is Head of Engineering at Eon Systems, where he works on brain emulation. During his time as a postdoc at UC Berkeley, Philip created a simulation of the fly brain using the Drosophila connectome. This model can predict the activation and silencing phenotypes of individual neurons in the fly brain. In his PhD work at Harvard University, Philip examined the genetics and biochemistry of the movement of double stranded RNA in the nematode C. elegans.