Tom Burns

Tom Burns graduated with First Class Honours in his Bachelor of Science from Monash University in 2013, exploring the mathematical features of human perception of non-linguistic sounds. Shifting to philosophy, he completed a Master of Bioethics in 2014, analyzing the ethics of euthanasia legislation in Australia, followed by a World Health Organization Bioethics Fellowship in 2015, contributing to the Ebola epidemic response. As a Master of Philosophy by Research student, he focused on electrophysiological signals in the rat barrel cortex, concurrently holding leadership roles in neuroscience student organizations. The title of his PhD thesis at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) in Japan was ‘Geometry and Topology in Memory and Navigation,’ wherein he employed ideas from higher mathematics to understand artificial and natural intelligence systems. In 2023, as a Fall Semester Postdoc at Brown University’s ICERM, he contributed to the ‘Math + Neuroscience’ program. Recently affiliated with Timaeus, an AI safety organization, Tom is continuing his research at Cornell University’s new SciAI Center from March 2024.