Team

Jed McCaleb is the founder of the Astera Institute. His focus is on accelerating progress, expanding potential, and increasing net happiness. He is also co-founder and Chief Architect of the Stellar Development Foundation, the organization that maintains the open-source Stellar Network and founder of Vast, the organization that is building the first commercial space station.

Seemay is a scientist, co-founder and CEO at Arcadia Science, chairperson of The Navigation Fund, and forever-Texan at heart. She received a PhD in Molecular Cell Biology from UC Berkeley and was previously a Pew Scholar and an assistant professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at UC San Francisco.

Anika started as a generalist at the Boston Consulting Group and KKR before leading Strategy and Operations for R&D at Solugen. She received SB’s in Materials Science and Engineering and in Management at MIT, where she also served as class president. She received her MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Becky is the Head of Science – Foundation, where she leverages a career defined by scaling scientific innovation across academic research, industrial R&D, and venture capital. Prior to joining Astera, Becky was an Investing Partner on the a16z Bio + Health team, building and funding cutting-edge biotech platforms. Her foundational experience spans both drug discovery and strategic development, including roles as an R&D Scientist and Business Development leader at Amgen, as well as postdoctoral studies at Genentech. She holds a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley and a B.S. from MIT.

Prachee has spent most of her academic life furthering the cause of Open Science. With a PhD in neuroscience and postdoctoral work in cell biology, Prachee has served as a professor and run research labs at the University of Kansas Medical Center and Dartmouth University’s Geisel School of Medicine. She is the Chief Science Officer at Arcadia Science; former president of the ASAPbio Board of Directors, former director and chair of the board at eLife, a member of Incentivizing Collaborative and Open Research; and a bioRxiv affiliate. As Astera’s Head of Open Science, Prachee leads a team of scientists and Fellows to push the boundaries of open science. 

Eli previously worked at the Abundance Institute, the Center for Growth and Opportunity, Boom Supersonic, and the Mercatus Center. He has incepted the cargo airship industry, written for the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, negotiated global supersonic standards at ICAO, derailed an international treaty as a State Department advisor, spent too much time on Twitter, and earned a PhD in economics from George Mason University.

Wes was previously the first hire at Screendoor, a venture capital fund of funds, and has worked as a seed stage investor, grantmaker, and strategy consultant in the public and private sectors. He comes from a family of Maori immigrants and loves basketball and jazz music. Wes earned a BA in economics from Johns Hopkins University and is a Kauffman Fellow.

Doris Tsao is the Chief Scientist for Neuro at Astera. Previously, she was a professor at UC Berkeley in the Neuroscience Department and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. She is known for elucidating the anatomical anatomy and coding principles of the primate face-processing system and for demonstrating its integration into a broader map of object space. Her recent theoretical work proposes a topological account of how object representations emerge in the visual system. She now aims to build on these advances to develop a deeper understanding of perception and consciousness through large-scale, causal manipulation of neural circuits.

Adam Shai has extensive research experience in experimental and computational neuroscience. He earned his PhD from Caltech and has over a decade of experience investigating the neural basis of intelligent behavior, most recently as a researcher at Stanford. Driven by the pressing need for AI safety, he has now turned his expertise to neural networks, aiming to develop principled methods for controlling and aligning increasingly advanced AI systems.

Paul Riechers has extensive research and leadership experience in the physics of information and computational mechanics, with expertise in the ultimate limits of learning and prediction.  He holds a PhD in theoretical physics and an MS in electrical and computer engineering from UC Davis. He co-founded the Beyond Institute for Theoretical Science (BITS), and now works to make AI understandable and safe.

Dr. O’Reilly is Professor of Psychology, Computer Science, and the Center for Neuroscience at the University of California Davis. He has authored over 70 journal articles and an influential textbook on computational cognitive neuroscience. His work focuses on biologically-based computational models of learning mechanisms in different brain areas, including hippocampus, prefrontal cortex and basal ganglia, and posterior visual cortex. He has received significant funding from ONR, NIH, NSF, IARPA, and DARPA. He is a primary author of the Emergent neural network simulation environment. O’Reilly completed a postdoctoral position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, earned his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Psychology from Carnegie Mellon University and was awarded an A.B. degree with highest honors in Psychology from Harvard University. Learn more about Randy’s work.

Michael Nielsen is a scientist who helped pioneer quantum computing and modern open science. His interests include metascience, programmable matter, and tools for thought. He is the recent co-author of a book-length essay, “A Vision of Metascience”, investigating the ways in which the social processes of science can become self-improving. All his work is united by a broader interest in tools that help people think and create, individually and collectively. Learn more about Michael’s work.

Steve Byrnes is a Boston-area physicist working on Artificial General Intelligence safety research (a.k.a. “AI Alignment”), mostly via thinking about neuroscience and algorithms. Learn more about Steve’s work.