Dr. Hector Zenil

Founder, CEO & CVO

Lab leader & senior researcher affiliated to five of the world’s top 5 universities in AI & Computer Science (Cambridge, Oxford, MIT, CMU) & in Medicine (Karolinska)

Elected member of the London Mathematical Society and of the Canadian College of Health Leaders (CCHL), and Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine.

Before joining the Machine Learning Group at the Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology at the University of Cambridge, he was a Senior Researcher and faculty member in the Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford.

He has published over 100 papers and a dozen of books (Springer Nature, Cambridge University Press, WS/Imperial College), including A Computable Universe with a foreword by Sir Roger Penrose (Nobel Prize in Physics, 2020).

In 2021, he was appointed Senior Researcher by the Alan Turing Institute at the British Library in London to advise the UK and allies on the future of Artificial Intelligence for scientific discovery, a position funded by the U.S. Department of Defense. In this capacity, he has led discussions on the global stage, under the auspices of organisations such as the OECD.

After joining the Unit of Computational Medicine as an Assistant Professor he became the leader of the Algorithmic Dynamics Lab at the Karolinska Institute (the institution that awards the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine), also affiliated with SciLifeLab and the Karolinska Hospital in Stockholm, Sweden.

He was a NASA Payload team member at MIT in Boston MA for the Mars Gravity Biosatellite to test the health effects of artificial microgravity on mammals. He helped develop the factual answering AI engine behind Siri and Alexa, reporting to Wolfram Research’s CEO, Stephen Wolfram in Champaign, IL.   

He holds 2 PhDs, one in Comp Sci (Lille), and another in Epistemology (Paris, Sorbonne) and has more than 20 years experience in academia and industry in six countries.

He has been featured in Wired, the New York Times, Le Monde, Scientific American, New Scientist, The Independent, and the MIT Technology Review, among other media venues.