Fellow
Joshua Elliott

Joshua got a PhD in 2008 in theoretical particle physics which he promptly put in a drawer and spent 10 years in academia doing computational climate economics and energy systems modeling, climate extremes, and climate impacts in hydrology, agriculture, migration and conflict (at the University of Chicago and Argonne National Lab). He co-founded the center for Robust Decision-making in Climate and Energy Policy at U. Chicago, started the Global Gridded Crop Modeling Intercomparison Project, launched an ag-focused climate informatics startup, and then spent 6 years at DARPA as a Program Manager in the Information Innovation Office where he had the privilege to program almost $600M in federal R&D funding. At DARPA he created, ran and transitioned programs generally in the area of “AI for Science” (computational science, data science, climate science, water/food/conflict, synthetic biology, epidemiology, systems biology, etc.). Tangential obsessions led to additional programs in things like Artificial Social Intelligence, AI for education, machine-assisted complex systems analysis and planning, optimal multi-species teaming (think canines+humans+drones), AI to advance discovery of critical minerals and natural hydrogen, and hybrid collective intelligent networks to reimagine institutional structures to optimize information flow and decision-making. Most recently Joshua spent some time in climate philanthropy, as a Programme Director at Quadrature Climate Foundation (leading strategies on solar radiation management, CO2 removals and vulnerability and resilience) and launched a non-profit science accelerator program called Brains (https://spec.tech/brains).