Meet the Fellows

Alexander Kiselev is a programmer, engineer, and hacker who thinks that the best way to continue the rapid rate of innovation in biotechnology and medicine is to open up the field to every garage, hobbyist, and scientist in developing countries. He is working on making open source scientific equipment which cost anywhere from five to ten times less than existing products by reducing the sales and maintenance overhead while increasing automation, integration, and ease of use. Born in Moscow, Alexander immigrated to the United States at the age of 5 and spent much of his childhood tinkering with computers and electronics while spending summers at his mother's biology labs. He has since seen first hand how the cost of even the most basic scientific equipment stifles innovation and makes original research in biology prohibitive to all but well funded organizations.

Anand dreams of a powerful union between systems biology and computer science, drawing on the ideas of both fields to eliminate human suffering. Through his past work in biotechnology, microscopy, and cloud computing, he has invented a host of systems that will underlie such a union. In the coming years, Anand will be working to harness the power of biomedical images, in the hope of unraveling biology's mysteries while accurately diagnosing disease.

Andrew founded Airy Labs to create the next generation of social learning games for kids. Airy Labs builds mobile and tablet games, all with a core educational mission to teach kids the things they need to be successful in their lives.

Ben wants to expand the breadth of human opportunity. The drive for progress and the excitement of new adventures inspired him to leave Harvard after a single semester and extend his horizons, first by traveling around the world and climbing Kilimanjaro, and now through his startup Sprayable Energy, which aims to radically transform the way we get our energy.

Charlie Stigler wants to improve education by developing new paradigms for computer interfaces in teaching and coaching. A software engineer, entrepreneur, and hacker of all things, he stopped out of Columbia after one year. He is the developer behind the open-source Mac focus application SelfControl, as well as a number of iPhone apps. In his spare time he is a competitive runner and oarsman.

Chris Olah is a member of hacklab.to, passionate about Mathematics and 3D printing. He's been involved in a number of open source projects around 3D printing (including designing a RepRap variant) and has spoken at a number of conferences.

You can see Chris' programming projects on github, including ImplicitCAD (his main project, a programmatic CAD tool), and a few neat proof of concept Haskell projects. You can also find his writing at his personal blog (see best posts), the RepRap blog, his notes on Byron Sonne's trial, and his github essays repository -- he's also published a paper, Producing Lenses With 3D Printers, in the Open Hardware Journal. His 3D projects are mostly on thingiverse (including a 3D-printable vacuum cleaner). Chris is honored to serve hacklab.to as one of its directors.

Technology and networked education are shaping our world, and I believe that developing communities would benefit as well from these useful tools.  Through my not-for-profit, Community Kit,  I will bring clean water using a UV light purification system, renewable solar/wind power and networked education to communities that request our service.  When delivering these systems we will be working with the community or school to further their already existing goals.  When the children of a community or school have their basic needs fulfilled they then may begin to dream. My goal is clear:  To gain a better understanding of why some regions of the world have progressed to a point where they can easily meet their basic needs while others have been left behind.  I am seeking to serve and assist receptive communities using my understanding of technology and networked education.  

Clay grew up in North Carolina and attended Berkeley for ten weeks before dropping out to pursue startups. He works on software that allows non-technical folks to build apps on smartphones and tablets which make their lives better.   Follow @clayallsopp

Connor Zwick just released the coco controller on kickstarter. It's a case for your phone that turns it into a full gaming console. Check it out here: kickstarter.com/projects/games/the-coco-controller?ref=recently_launched

Dale was homeschooled, then unschooled.  Today, he is a sought-after education expert appearing on major news networks including CNN, ABC, NPR, CBS, and Fox.  His work has been covered by the New York Times and New York Magazine to Fast Company and Forbes. Dale founded UnCollege to prove that education isn’t limited to school.  Perigee/Penguin will publish his first book, Hacking Your Education, a guide to gaining the skills that school doesn't teach, in early 2013. He loves dark chocolate almost as much as frequent flyer miles.

Dan is co-founder of Thinkful, the online school that uses one-on-one tutoring and personalized curricula to help students rapidly learn employable skills. Thinkful uses each student’s current skill-set, goals and schedule to build a custom curriculum of learning materials and projects.

We're hiring! If you care about future of education, think of yourself as a life-long learner and teacher at the same time, and want to join a quickly growing startup in NYC, send me a note. Even if none of the positions listed match you, please do reach out; we're always open to exceptional talent.

Dan previously worked at RRE Ventures and at Elm City Labs. Before taking leave for the fellowship, Dan studied Ethics, Politics, and Economics at Yale.

Darren Zhu is interested in methods of rapidly predicting and engineering biological systems.

I do a bit of web design from time to time and find most things interesting.

Dylan is building a browser based photo editing tool with his friend Evan Wallace. In the past he has worked at Flipboard, O'Reilly Media, Indinero, Microsoft Research and LinkedIn. He is currently stopped out of his Junior year at Brown where he studied Mathematics and Computer Science. Learn more at dylanfield.com.

Named one of the 30 under 30 in Forbes’ Energy category for 2012 and Ashoka’s Youth Social Entrepreneur of the Year, Eden founded Roseicollis Technologies Inc. to take her solar panel tracking invention called the SunSaluter to developing communities and established markets that need them. The SunSaluter won the Mashable/UN Foundation Startups for Social Good Challenge and was awarded the runner-up prize at the 2011 Postcode Lottery Green Challenge. Eden’s other life passion is being a coxswain in the sport of rowing. This summer 2012, she has been named to the Canadian senior women’s development team to race for her country at two international regattas, Holland Beker in Amsterdam and Henley Royal in London.

Eric has a bachelor's degree in economics from Arizona State University and is interested in applying economic principles to solve problems in finance, marketing, and the developing world. Eric draws on his background working with large data sets for hedge funds, equity research firms, and the Federal Reserve Bank to approach problems in a scientific and quantitative fashion.

I'm working on (what I think are) interesting applications of mobile technology

Gary Kurek has been developing mobility aids for physically-disabled citizens for the last four years. Seeing his grandmother weakened by cancer led Gary to invent a walker-wheelchair hybrid that can provide power to assist its user according to how strong she feels at any moment. This flexibility allows users to restore their strength, instead of growing dependent on a substitute. Gary is currently working on expanding the versatility of his mobility aids, making them lighter, foldable, and capable of navigating any home environment including staircases. Gary hails from Alberta, Canada, and is the 19-year-old founder of GET Mobility Solutions.

Ilya wants to revolutionize the way the technology and health care communities work together. He is working to create a more open and transparent health care system, drastically lowering the cost of care and empowering patients to make better decisions.

Jeffrey Lim is working on software solutions for easier peer-to-peer transactions and payments. He is currently participating in the inaugural batch of NReduce.

In 2009, with a friend Jim converted a Porsche 924s to electric. Since then, Jim has been interested in how electric vehicles can change transportation. He has built power electronics for the vehicles and is now working on an electric motor. It's a brushless dc motor without rare earth magnets. In little time it will be in the most efficient vehicles on the road.

The effort needed to modify software is frequently far out-of-proportion to the conceptual difficulty; as the year 2000 rolled around, companies spent hundreds of billions to change the number of digits used to store a year. Jimmy has been working on applying techniques from formal methods and program analysis in order to close the gap, beginning by adapting recent research in program repair (automated bug-fixing) for practical use. He has degrees in Computer Science and Mathematics, both from Carnegie Mellon University.

I applied to the Thiel Fellowship with an idea regarding the feasibility of resource extraction from Near Earth Objects. In the past six months, I've discovered that large, high capital expenditure projects with global ramifications and enormous positive impact run into several key challenges in deployment. I'm working on a project right now to solve these problems. Check back later for further details. Or contact me at jburnham@thielfellowship.org if you want to learn more.

I have a multidisciplinary background in the areas of science and technology that I leverage to go after big problems. In the past I have designed technologies ranging from antibiotic resistance counter-agents, to spontaneous radiative thermal energy harvesting at room temperature. Currently I am working on developing a revolutionary method DNA synthesis that will accelerate the field of synthetic biology.

Laura Deming wants to extend the human lifespan for a few more centuries—at the very least. She started working in a biogerontology lab when she was 12, matriculated at MIT when she was 14, and now at 17 plans on disrupting the current research paradigm by changing the incentives embedded in today’s traditional funding structures.

Nick Cammarata left Carnegie Mellon's computer science program to co-found Tablo, a tool for teachers. Previously, he co-founded an file storage application that received 80 million visitors, worked for institutions and corporations such as Harvard, Stanford, Mozilla, and Microsoft, and helped create Popcorn.js, a JavaScript library for HTML5 video.

Noor Siddiqui is working on ventures to activate the untapped human capital in the bottom billion. Current explorations: commercial surrogacy, alternative education models, and mobile technology. She believes in transforming the way the world responds to persistent poverty and increasing inequality by reducing dependency and encouraging sustainable cooperation.

Omar is devoted to building useful technology. He's working on pulling together big datasets to visualize social and economic trends and improve decision-making. He's worked on a number of cool projects and even once got a cease-and-desist letter from a major corporation for one of them.

Paul had completed 3 years of credits at Yale University when he decided to pursue the Thiel Fellowship. He has a deep interest in questions of efficiency and in using market principles to make life better. Paul has previously worked for D.E. Shaw & Co., several social enterprises, and a few start-ups. He has always liked to take initiative on building things, whether it was making a simple website in high school to share advice with younger students, or writing himself a program to do research on investment ideas during his sophomore year at Yale.

I grew up in New York City and studied Mathematics at the City University of New York College of State Island and later Computer Science and Nanomaterials at the Georgia Institute of Technology. I am very interested in theoretical sciences and quantitative fields in general. Currently I am working with Thiel Fellow Kettner Griswold in launching our first company, Evolutionary Solutions. We are looking to revolutionize the field of DNA synthesis and facilitate accelerated research in synthetic biology.

Ritik Malhotra is a hacker at heart, having started to program at the early age of eight. In middle school, Ritik started a profitable web hosting company and a web forum that grew to over 32,000 members within the first nine months. Having attended UC Berkeley, Ritik co-started Hackers@Berkeley, a 500+ member community that promotes building and hacking, and has completed over six technical internships, including one at Twitter last summer. Ritik is now a co-founder of Greply, a venture-backed startup in the Silicon Valley, and is tackling problems in the e-commerce space.

Ryan is on a mission to make computers and mobile devices...suck less. He founded his first startup during his Freshman year and won multiple awards. An advocate for Lean Startup philosophy, Ryan moved to San Francisco in October after attending Startup School and has mentored and judged local startup events.

Interested in type theory

Spencer Hewett has wanted to be an inventor since he was three years old and has worked on projects ranging from synthetic organic chemistry to intelligent physical advertising systems. His latest invention seeks to eliminate both checkout lines and shoplifting, revolutionizing the shopping experience.

Sujay was one of the youngest students at Harvard, until he left during his Junior Year. For six years since the age of 11, Sujay conducted biofuel research surrounding the conversion of cellulose to ethanol for which he won the International Energy Olympiad and was named one of the Top Young Scientists across New York. Since then, he and his older brother, Sheel Tyle - now a Venture Capitalist - have co-founded and ran ReSight, Inc. - a 501(c)(3) non-profit dedicated to eradicating blindness. With the Thiel Fellowship, Sujay will lead Business Development and Strategy at Los Angeles based start-up, Scopely.

Tara Seshan believes that uniting public health and technology will make the seemingly unrealizable goals in the field realities. After researching developing world health systems in Southeast Asia and working with startups in Silicon Valley, Tara wants to create tangible tools to change the industries.

18 year old Applied Nuclear Physicist. Solving the world's problems with Nuclear Technology

Tom Currier's dream is to become a successful inventor, and after starting his first business at nine, he began to use entrepreneurship as a creative outlet. Passionate about renewable energy, Currier co-founded Black Swan Solar two years ago to commercialize an invention that will fundamentally disrupt utility scale solar. Please checkout the following website for more information: http://www.sandbox-network.com/meet-a-sandboxer/meet-a-sandboxer-tom-currier/

Tony is always excited in solving problems with no one right answer. He enjoys problems in interdisciplinary Computer Science. Currently, he is working on solving Computer Vision, with a specific focus on biological images.

Yoonseo is an open source hardware developer working at Open Tech Forever, an open hardware cooperative in Denver, Colorado.