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About the author
About the Author
Michael Gunnels is a computational neuroscientist and technology strategist specializing in whole-brain emulation, connectomics, and the engineering of substrate-independent intelligence. He holds a B.S. in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. in Computational Neuroscience from the University of Cambridge, where his dissertation work focused on scalable neural simulation architectures and the information-theoretic constraints on mind uploading fidelity.
Gunnels has spent the past fifteen years at the intersection of neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and long-term technology forecasting. He has held research positions at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, where he contributed to the development of standardized neural circuit models, and at DeepMind, where he worked on biologically constrained reinforcement learning algorithms. His published research spans neural network theory, connectome data analysis, and the computational resource requirements of whole-brain emulation, appearing in journals including *Nature Neuroscience*, *Neural Computation*, and the *Journal of Consciousness Studies*.
He is the founder and director of the Cygnus Project, a nonprofit research initiative dedicated to developing open-source tools for neural preservation and simulation validation. The project's benchmark suite for comparing emulation fidelity across different simulation platforms has been adopted by several academic and commercial mind uploading efforts. He serves on the advisory board of the Brain Preservation Foundation and the Carboncopies Foundation, and is a regular speaker at the annual International Conference on Whole Brain Emulation.
Outside of his technical work, Gunnels writes extensively on the social, ethical, and governance challenges posed by digital immortality, with a particular focus on the resource economics of persistent digital consciousness and the legal frameworks needed to protect the rights of uploaded persons. His analysis has been cited in policy documents by the Future of Humanity Institute, the OECD's AI Governance Working Group, and the United Nations University.
He lives in San Francisco, California, where he maintains a small wet lab for neural tissue preservation research and an unusually large server closet for running neural simulations that he describes as "half science, half meditation." He can be reached through his website at mgunnels.net, and he maintains an active presence on the LessWrong forum and the Effective Altruism Forum under the handle mnemosyne.
