Kadair Eskandar
Hi, I'm Kadair! I live in San Francisco and currently building Catalyst, an incubator for academic researchers to start research companies.
I'm alarmed by frontier AI research concentrating in a few closed labs, leaving very few researchers able to participate. Many promising ideas from academic researchers fade in the lab before they see light in the market. There is plenty of untapped founder talent in academic research, and I'm creating a mechanism for researchers to test their ideas, apply their research, and start frontier research companies.
In the past
- I studied biomedical engineering and biodesign at Washington University in Saint Louis
- In grad school, I designed a method to access the radial artery during high risk vascular surgeries with Mohamed Zayed.
- I later joined a medical robotic startup, where I helped develop tomography as a method to accurately locate lung tumors in quasi-realtime during biopsy. We went from a prototype at the time I joined to FDA clearance in less than 2 years. Since, the robot has treated over 10,000 patients.
- In 2023, I joined Jeremy Nixon to start AGI House SF and ran it as head of operations - it quickly became a central node for ML researchers and hackers to build together and start companies.
- I later joined Kyle Morris to help build DEMi and grow the network to hundreds of researchers, engineers, and policymakers.
As for research, I'm interested in agent-based simulation, AI-human and AI-AI interactions to understand how these systems will shape human coordination at scale.
As I reflect on my work, one consistent thread is I find it deeply rewarding to 1. pick and support highly agentic and ambitious builders who hold a theory of shaping the future and 2. design an environment for them to do their best work.
If you're an ML academic researcher interested in translating your research, reach out!