Our team
We've come together from academia, startups, and the public sector, united by a belief that the hardest problems in computing and human flourishing deserve serious, long-horizon research.
R&D Lead · Operations · Focus Area Leads
Juan Benet
Founder and CEO
Juan Benet is the founder of Protocol Labs and GP of PLC Neurotech. He is a frontier technology investor across neurotech, AI, biotech, and crypto. Some of his high-conviction, contrarian bets include: Bitcoin (2013), Et…
Molly Mackinlay
Engineering & Research Lead
Molly leads the Protocol Dev, Product Dev, and Research Dev teams at Protocol Labs. Her work includes protocol design and development for the IPFS Project, the Filecoin Network, libp2p, IPLD, and Drand. She is also the C…
Will Scott
Digital Human Rights Lead
Will's research interests are on access to genuine online services. He believes that Internet access should not be hampered by explicit censorship from government and corporate entities, by integrity failures in online s…
Sean Escola
Neurotech Lead
Sean is the Neurotech Lead and a Venture Partner / EIR at Protocol Labs. He is a computational neuroscientist, clinical psychiatrist, and entrepreneur dedicated to the intersection of neurotech and NeuroAI. Sean co-found…
David Dao
Economies & Governance Co-Lead
David is the Economies & Governance Co-Lead at PL R&D and the Chief Scientist at GainForest.Earth. A pioneer in data valuation for machine learning, David holds a PhD in Computer Science from ETH Zurich. His work sits at…
James Tunningley
Economies & Governance Co-Lead · Strategic Philanthropy Lead
James Tunningley is Economies & Governance Co-Lead at PL R&D, where he also leads Philanthropy. Previously, James was a Senior Advisor at Architect Systems Capital Management and the Architect Institute. Before that, he…
Lukas Bresser
Research Strategy & Programs Lead
Lukas develops strategies, tools, and programs to accelerate scientific progress and bring frontier technologies into use. He studies what helps or hinders progress in emerging fields and develops PL R&D's methodology fo…
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