Projects
Generative Design of Aerospace Hardware
A collaboration with NASA JPL, academic institutions, and industry to evolve next-generation science and engineering hardware.
Autogenetics contributes to the generative design of aerospace hardware, developing methods to evolve aerodynamically optimal spacecraft fairings for very low Earth orbit, as well as radio antennas and antenna arrays. This approach combines evolutionary optimization with high-fidelity, physics-based simulation to explore large, highly constrained design spaces and identify promising solutions that conventional workflows would miss. This project is part of Nebulous, a collaboration bringing together NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, leading academic institutions including Michigan State University, Ohio State University, and the University of Colorado Boulder, and industry partners.
ELFA: Evolutionary Lab for Flexible Agents
The platform behind Autogenetics’ approach to evolving general intelligence.
ELFA emulates, in fine mechanistic detail, the genome and sensory-regulatory networks of prokaryotic cells, which are the control systems that give even the simplest organisms their remarkable autonomy. ELFA serves two purposes: a scientific model for studying how cellular regulation evolved, and an engineering framework for evolving bioinspired control systems. ELFA’s digital cells have evolved control strategies that mirror those of living microbes and generalize to conditions never seen during evolution. Building on this, we aim to evolve autonomous control for demanding applications, and, ultimately, cells that self-assemble into brain-like plastic networks. The goal is a bioinspired, more general AI that performs like natural intelligence — capable of lifelong learning and common-sense flexibility.
The Chemical Origins of Evolution
An ongoing collaboration with Howard University and the University of Michigan to recreate the chemical evolution that led to life.
We are designing and building a pilot experiment to test whether the conditions known to foster experimental evolution, such as spatial heterogeneity, environmental variability, and multiple energy sources, can drive the same dynamics in prebiotic chemistry, leading to a sustained chemical evolution process that produces meaningful variation and complexification. The pilot will prototype an automated continuous-flow apparatus and analytical pipeline, and identify the most promising chemical regimes for a subsequent multi-year experiment. This will be the first sustained attempt to observe in the laboratory the spontaneous emergence of evolving chemistry — the missing first step in the story that led to life and biological intelligence.