People
Board of Directors
Ilyas Khan
Chair
Ilyas Khan is the chair of the Topos board of directors. He is also the CEO and founder of Quantinuum. Ilyas was the founding Chairman of The Stephen Hawking Foundation, is a Fellow of St Edmund’s College at the University of Cambridge, and is a Leader in Residence at the Judge Business School, where he was instrumental in establishing the Accelerate Cambridge programme. Beyond his leadership in quantum computing, Ilyas has a long-standing interest in the foundations of mathematics and category theory and is a Life Member of the American Mathematical Society.
Wesley Phoa
Treasurer
Wesley Phoa is a Partner at Capital Group, an investment management firm based in Los Angeles. He uses mathematics and economics to manage portfolios designed to meet the needs of individual and institutional investors. He has previously served as board chair at the LA Conservancy. Wesley's earlier academic work, following a PhD at the University of Cambridge, focused on applications of category theory to theoretical computer science.
David Spivak
Secretary
In addition to serving as the Secretary of the Board, David Spivak is on the Topos staff as Senior Scientist and Institute Fellow, following an appointment as founding Chief Scientist. He comes to Topos after a decade at MIT. Since his PhD from UC Berkeley in 2007, he has worked to bring category-theoretic ideas into science, technology, and society, through novel mathematical research and collaboration with scientists from disciplines including Materials Science, Chemistry, Robotics, Aeronautics, and Computing. His mission at Topos is to help develop the ability for people, organizations, and societies to see more clearly—and hence to serve—the systems which sustain them.
Edward Kmett
Board Member
Edward Kmett is Head of Software Engineering at AI hardware start-up Groq. Previously, he was a Senior Researcher at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, where he worked on programming languages and ensuring safe development of artificial intelligence systems. He is a prominent Haskell developer known for popularizing the use of lenses in functional programming, and maintains a significant portion of all Haskell core libraries.
Leadership and Executive
As Institute Fellow, David Spivak also serves on the Leadership team.
Brendan Fong
Chief Executive
Brendan Fong oversees coordination and strategic planning at Topos. He holds a PhD in computer science from Oxford, and undertook postdoctoral studies in systems engineering and mathematics at UPenn and MIT. He is a founding executive editor of the open-access journal Compositionality, and co-authored the textbook An Invitation to Applied Category Theory. Brendan believes technologies of connection and integration are already transforming the world we live in, and is dedicated to ensuring that these transformations benefit society-at-large.
Shaowei Lin
Director of Research
Shaowei Lin provides leadership and administrative infrastructure for basic and applied research at Topos. He believes in making machine intelligence (neural, symbolic, and other forms) safer and more accessible for the disadvantaged. His research focuses on spiking networks and program synthesis, via tools from information theory, algebraic statistics, singular learning, type theory and category theory. Shaowei received his PhD in mathematics from Berkeley (with Bernd Sturmfels). He has led research and strategic planning in different contexts - postdoc (Berkeley-Stanford), government (A*STAR), faculty (SUTD) and startup (Cues.sg, Awecom) - and enjoys building bridges between them.
Tish Tanski
Special Strategic Advisor
Tish Tanski provides strategic guidance in developing and operating Topos through her consulting practice, T2 Strategy. She holds an MSW from the University of Michigan in Social Policy and Planning and has extensive experience in running and launching scientific research organizations in diverse fields from genetics, autism, and cancer to environmental research. She previously served as the President of the Association of Independent Research Institutes. Tish believes that Topos Institute has the potential to transform the way information flows through science and technology for the benefit of the public.
Beth Williams
Finance and Operations Manager
Beth Williams is responsible for the financial management and general operations at Topos. She has spent her career in nonprofit administration and public accounting. Previously, she was the Senior Accountant at Mindful Schools and Operations Manager for EdTec. Beth graduated with a BA from the University of Washington and has an MPA. She believes in Topos' mission to shape technology for public benefit by advancing sciences of connection and integration.
Senior Advisors
John Baez
Senior Advisor
John Baez is Professor of Mathematics at the University of California, Riverside, known for his work on quantum gravity and higher category theory. His work in public communication of the sciences began in 1993 with his long running column “This Week’s Finds in Mathematical Physics”. In 2010, he founded the Azimuth Project, a focal point for scientists and engineers devoted to studying mathematical sciences for addressing climate change and other environmental and ecological problems. He brings this spirit to his work at Topos.
Eugenia Cheng
Senior Advisor
Eugenia Cheng is Scientist in Residence at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and honorary visiting fellow at City, University of London, and was previously tenured at the University of Sheffield. She is the author of four popular math books, including How to Bake Pi: An Edible Exploration of the Mathematics of Mathematics, and x + y: A Mathematician’s Manifesto for Rethinking Gender. Alongside her research in category theory and undergraduate teaching, her aim is to rid the world of math phobia.
David Danks
Senior Advisor
David Danks is Professor of Data Science & Philosophy at University of California, San Diego. His research ranges widely across philosophy, cognitive science, and machine learning, including their intersection. He has examined the ethical, psychological, and policy issues around AI, and also developed multiple causal discovery algorithms and computational cognitive theories.
Grace Lyo
Senior Advisor
Grace Lyo received a mathematics PhD from UC Berkeley in 2007 and was a CLE Moore Instructor at MIT until 2010. Around this time her interest transitioned from proving conjectures in algebraic topology to improving the state of online learning, and she joined the Harvard-MIT education consortium EdX as a Fellow. Grace is now an Assistant Dean at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. She is excited to bring her knowledge of business practices back to her home community of mathematicians, helping Topos find its place and thrive within the wider world.
Lisa Raphals
Senior Advisor
Lisa Raphals is Professor of Comparative Literature, cooperating faculty in Philosophy, and Chair, Program in Classical Studies and Program in Comparative Ancient Civilizations at the University of California, Riverside. She is a specialist in philosophy and history of science in early China and Greece, with interests in AI, cognitive science, ethics, and science fiction, and author of six books. Her expertise in these topics informs our work on ethics and technology at Topos.
Dana Scott
Senior Advisor
Dana Scott is the emeritus Hillman University Professor of Computer Science, Philosophy, and Mathematical Logic at Carnegie Mellon University. Along with Michael Rabin, he was awarded the 1976 Turing Award for their joint work on automata theory. Some of his many seminal contributions relate to modal logic, model theory, set theory, topos theory, and the theory of programming languages. He is known in particular for his creation of domain theory, a branch of mathematics that is applied to programming-language semantics.
Staff
Kevin Arlin
Research Software Engineer
Kevin is a mathematician, software engineer and math educator. He comes to Topos from a category theory Ph.D. at UCLA and master’s at Cambridge via a period in ed tech. His key intellectual interest is in finding effective angles for non-experts to use and understand mathematical structures that have traditionally been reserved for a narrow group of initiates focused on problems far from everyday life. This applies to everything from helping ordinary category theorists use infinity-categories to helping high schoolers use group theory to, primarily now, helping scientists use categorical structures in their applied work.
Kristopher Brown
Research Software Engineer
Kris Brown previously completed a postdoc in computer science at UF and a PhD in chemical engineering at Stanford University. Kris is interested in helping scientists (and others) better organize their knowledge and communicate with each other. Kris studies categorical gadgets such as diagrams, sketches, and (co)limits as a language to construct more transparent, extensible, and composable approaches to problems of scientific interest such as constraint solvers, rewrite systems, linear algebra, and model exploration.
Tim Hosgood
Research Affiliate
Tim Hosgood is a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Quantum Technologies, and research affiliate with Topos. Although his main research focuses on simplicial methods in algebraic geometry, he has a keen interest in understanding how we can use mathematics to make mathematics (and science, and knowledge in general) more accessible to all, with a particular penchant for translation.
Sophie Libkind
Postdoctoral Researcher
Sophie Libkind is a PhD candidate in Math at Stanford University and a research assistant at Topos. Her research is motivated by connections between continuous dynamics occurring in nature and symbolic computation. Sophie is also passionate about education both in terms of redefining what it means to “be a math person” as well as bridging the languages of math and science.
Owen Lynch
Research Software Engineer
Owen Lynch is a mathematician who sometimes writes software. He holds a MSc in Mathematics (concentration: Probability and Statistics) from Utrecht University and a BSc in Mathematics from Brown University. Fundamentally, Owen is interested in two things. The first thing is user interface design, specifically user interface design for mathematics. This ranges from streamlining mathematical theories to make them cleaner and easier to understand, to figuring out how to do math on a computer effectively, to actual web interfaces for mathematical objects. The second thing is statistical mechanics: how does predictability emerge from many small parts that we have only imperfect information about? Hopefully the first thing should end up making the second thing easier to answer.
Valeria de Paiva
Principal Research Scientist
Valeria de Paiva is a mathematician and AI scientist, working on natural language processing, logical inference, and all kinds of semantics. Before Topos, Valeria was tenured at the University of Birmingham, and worked at top industry NLP labs, including Samsung Research America, Nuance, Deem, Cuil, and for many years at Xerox PARC. She is very keen on making sure that women are not short-changed in their professional lives. For that she maintains the “Women in Logic" Facebook group and blog, helps the “ACM-W Scholarship" program, and started the international workshop “Women in Logic", now in its 4th year.
Evan Patterson
Research Scientist
Evan Patterson is an applied mathematician, data scientist, and software engineer. He recently completed a PhD in Statistics at Stanford University and holds a BSc in Mathematics and Physics from Caltech. Evan aims to build next-generation tools for scientific and statistical modeling, structured by the concepts of category theory. In keeping with the spirit of the Topos Institute, he believes that science and technology form an integrated whole and should be employed to benefit, rather than to exploit, humanity.
Toby Smithe
Research Affiliate
Toby Smithe is a PhD candidate at the University of Oxford, and a research affiliate with Topos. Toby studies the mathematical structures that give systems life, with a particular focus on the theory of active inference, a story about how cognitive systems work together and learn to navigate their worlds. He seeks to bring this life to artificial systems that currently lack it: to build smarter computer assistants for science, tools to harness the power of biology, and ultimately more ecological societies.
Priyaa Srinivasan
Postdoctoral Researcher
Priyaa Varshinee Srinivasan is a compassionate mathematician at Topos. Along with research in category theory, she is interested in creating pathways to make math communication user-friendly and approachable – from math in school to mathematical research. She is inspired by works of Tai Danae Bradley, Eugenia Cheng, John Baez, Pawel Sobocinski, Bob Coecke and many others in this area. Her research experience includes categorical quantum mechanics, linearly distributive categories and currently polynomial functors.
Juliet Szatko
Administrative Associate
Juliet Szatko is excited about contributing to the future shape of foundational research and ultimately, technology for public benefit. She is an MA in Philosophy candidate at Loyola Marymount University, studying applied ethics. At Topos, she collaborates across projects, primarily within the domain of research administration, to help ensure team success. Juliet shares in Topos’ hope that we can establish an equitable society powered by digital technologies, so that the systems that surround us benefit us all.