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About Me

I am an inventor and entrepreneur. I have invented a new nanofabrication method, a new approach to sensing neural activity with probes in the bloodstream, new ways to extract spatial and temporal information from RNA sequencing, a new protein sequencing method, and a new approach to mapping connections in the brain, among other things. I founded the Applied Biotechnology Laboratory at the Francis Crick Institute in January 2021 with the goal of combining bioengineering and entrepreneurship to develop and deploy new biotechnologies that address major unmet needs for biology and medicine. In 2023, I launched Future House, a new research moonshot in San Francisco, focused on building an AI Scientist.

Some problems I think are interesting:

  • How we can engineer human biology, including how we can design interventions to repair and improve our bodies, how we can deliver those interventions to where we want them to go, how we control them once they are in the body.

  • How we can increase the rate at which we iterate on new therapies by a factor of 10.

  • How we can interface with the brain and with the immune system.

  • How we can create new kinds of life.

  • How we can regenerate limbs and other body parts.

  • How we can put humans into hibernation.

  • How we can accelerate science using machine learning.

  • How we can measure which things in the world are conscious and which are not conscious.

  • How we can achieve any of the above within my lifetime.

In addition to my academic work, I also invent new structures for scientific research. The incentives of modern universities promote some kinds of research at the expense of others, and by creating new structures, we can push science and innovation in previously inaccessible directions. Previously, I was one of the primary originators of the Focused Research Organization concept, a new structure for scientific projects that are too large for an academic lab but that are not investable for profit, which is now powering projects in areas such as longevity, non-model organisms, and brain mapping.

Prior to starting my lab, I was an entrepreneur in residence at Petri, a biotech accelerator in Boston, Massachusetts, and co-founded three companies commercializing technologies I invented. In the spring of 2019, I graduated with a PhD in Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, having worked between the MIT Media Lab, the MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. I have received numerous awards and fellowships to support my research, including the 2022 Allen Distinguished Investigator Award, 2019 Stat Wunderkind award, the Hertz Foundation Thesis Prize, the Myhrvold and Havranek Family Charitable Fund Hertz Graduate Fellowship, and an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and a Churchill Scholarship.

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Contact Me

Leader of the Applied Biotechnology Lab, Francis Crick Institute

sam dot rodriques AT gmail.com

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