Funding ambitious research in longevity and neuroscience
Grants
We’ve funded research, initiatives, and programs making breakthroughs in aging and neuroscience
Our mission is to engage skilled researchers and support ambitious ideas in the longevity and neuroscience fields. In the past few years, we have donated and committed over $50M to research spanning neuroAI, brain aging, centenarian genetics, and next-gen neurotechnologies.
Featured
Read more about our projects, roadmaps, and grants
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Raiany Romanni Launches Silver Linings
Raiany Romanni, Economics and Policy Lead at Amaranth, launches Silver Linings: An Open Project to Accelerate Human Longevity. This interactive simulation tool that lets you input your own timelines and assumptions for specific breakthroughs in aging research, then see the ROI in terms of US population & GDP growth.
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![Colorful digital rendering of a dense network of intertwined, multicolored neural-like structures on a black background.]()
E11 Bio Announces Milestone
E11 Bio announces PRISM, the first step towards making brain connectivity mapping and reconstruction (connectomics) radically faster, cheaper and more accessible.
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![A timeline diagram showing levels of cognitive systems from computational to implementational. It includes milestones such as reverse-engineer loss functions, build cognitive architectures, reverse-engineer sensory systems, brain-informed process supervision, embodied digital twins, and detailed biophysical models.]()
NeuroAI for AI Safety Whitepaper Launches
This whitepaper outlines how NeuroAI can be a differential path to building safer AI systems, led by Patrick Mineault with Joanne Peng and Niccolo Zanichelli. We can drastically accelerate this path in <7 years with scalable approaches anchored in data. The intermediate steps also enable virtual neuroscience and shorten the translational timelines for new neurotechnology.
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Amaranth Foundation Covered in Bloomberg
Amaranth’s founder, James Fickel, is covered in Bloomberg by Ashlee Vance.
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The Enigma Project Launches
The Enigma Project at Stanford in partnership with IMEC, launches out of stealth to decode the brain, led by Andreas Tolias, Tirin Moore, Sophia Sanborn, and Barun Dutta.
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Xin Jin (Scripps) Publishes New Paper
Partially funded by Amaranth, Xin Jin (Scripps) publishes a paper titled “Massively parallel in vivo Perturb-seq reveals cell-type-specific transcriptional networks in cortical development”, a leap from existing capabilities.
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![A 3D rendering of a human brain with interconnected nodes marked by green and blue dots, connected by dashed white lines indicating neural pathways.]()
Forest Neurotech Announces New Funding
Convergent Research announces $18M in funding for Forest Neurotech with support from Eric Schmidt, Griffin Catalyst, the Riley & Susan Bechtel Foundation, and James Fickel.
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Aging is No Blessing
Policy and ethics lead Raiany Romanni writes for Palladium Magazine. “By our first full decade of life, we’d never think to ask: why did lobsters grow wise and strong, while we grew wise and frail?”
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![Line graph showing simulated survival of 40-year-old women taking a drug that reduces death risk by 20%, comparing intervention and placebo groups over 40 years. The x-axis represents years of trial, and the y-axis shows proportion alive, with a legend indicating yellow for intervention group and blue for placebo group.]()
Bottlenecks of Aging
A comprehensive report from our scientific advisory board and team consisting of bottlenecks of the field, and specific actionable projects that can unlock progress.
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XPrize Launch
Our policy and ethics lead, Raiany Romanni, writes about the recent $101M XPrize launch to extend human healthspan.
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Brain Aging White Paper
Led by Amaranth internal lead Rohan Krajeski, this paper explores understudied approaches to brain aging — endogenous neurogenesis, exogenous replacement of cells and tissues, extracellular matrix repair, and learning from non-model organisms.
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![Microscope image showing a fluorescently labeled cell with three distinct labels: rsFusionRed1 in blue, rsTagRFP in green, and rScarlet in pink, with a scale bar of 20 micrometers.]()
Spatial Multiplexing Technology
Partially funded by Amaranth, the Boyden lab at MIT has developed a way to simultaneously image up to five different molecules within a cell, by targeting glowing reporters to distinct locations inside the cell.
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Summer Course on Aging
The Biology of Aging course teaches newcomer scientists the fundamentals of geroscience. It is led by Jennifer Garrison and William Mair in partnership with the Marine Biological Laboratory.
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![A starry night sky with the outline of a face formed by stars, and the silhouette of a blue dress or garment at the bottom.]()
Time Initiative
In partnership with the American Federation of Aging Research and led by Amaranth’s internal lead, Courtney Hudson-Paz, the Time Initiative’s goal is to accelerate young talent in aging biology through a fellowship program. Meet the 2023 fellows here!
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![Minimalist illustration of a wine glass with a slice of red wine on the rim, in a black background.]()
Amaranth Prize
The Amaranth Prize powered by Research Portfolio gives no-strings-attached funding to the best research in longevity. It rewards research retrospectively. See the winning papers for the 2023 prize on protein aging here.
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Impetus Grants
Impetus Grants provide fast grants up to $500k within 3 weeks for scientists to work on aging biology. It is led by Amaranth board member Martin Borsch Jensen and Lada Nuzhna.
Our Team
We are a group of scientists and entrepreneurs accelerating transformative science
Core Team
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James is an investor and futurist, seeking frontier technologies that have the potential to radically improve the state of humanity. As an early investor in Ethereum, James has leveraged his capital to fund ambitious projects across longevity, neuroscience, AI, crypto, and more. He founded the Amaranth Foundation to accelerate research in neuroscience and longevity, funding academic research at many leading institutions, while also backing revolutionary initiatives such as the Enigma Project, E11 Bio, Forest Neurotech, Impetus Grants, and the AFAR SuperAgers Cohort.
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Joanne serves as Research Director of the Amaranth Foundation, where she oversees philanthropic investments in neuroscience and longevity research, including as lead of investments into the Enigma Project, E11 Bio, and Forest Neurotech. Previously, Joanne was a Thiel Fellow, Interact Fellow, Day One Project Fellow, and Davis UWC Scholar. With seven years of diverse scientific experience, Joanne has made significant contributions across multiple disciplines. Her work spans spatial protein sequencing at MIT’s Boyden Lab, metabolic modeling at Princeton University, mitochondrial dynamics at the Biomedical Institute at MaRS, COVID testing at Curative, and cancer research at the Buck Institute.
Joanne holds a BS in Computer Science from Princeton University and is currently on a gap year from her PhD in Bioengineering at Stanford University.
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Patrick is the NeuroAI Research Lead, where he oversees neuroscience and artificial intelligence research. A computational vision neuroscientist by training, he focuses his time at on creating a path toward safe AI by learning from the brain. His research at the intersection of neuroscience and AI has been published in NeurIPS, PNAS, Neuron, Nature Human Behavior, and the Journal of Neuroscience, and has been featured in The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal and a16z’s Future. In prior roles, Patrick was a data scientist and software engineer at Google, a brain-computer interface engineer at Meta, a senior machine learning scientist at Mila, and was a co-founder of Neuromatch. He runs the neuroAI archive, the most subscribed neuroAI Substack.
Patrick holds a BS in Mathematics and Physics and a PhD in neuroscience from McGill University.
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Jarod is an interdisciplinary scientist and entrepreneur dedicated to expanding human health, human potential, and human agency. He is passionate about healthy life extension, AI, and neurotechnology. At Starbloom he oversees a portfolio spanning traditional and frontier therapeutics, platforms, medical devices, techbio, life science tools, and diagnostics. Before joining Starbloom, Jarod built companies in CNS drug development, molecular diagnostics, and computer vision technology, and has extensive research and development experience spanning the biology of aging, neuroimmunology, AI, functional genomics, human genetics, medicinal chemistry, materials science, synthetic biology, and computational biology. Jarod’s work has been published in Nature, Cell, Science, and featured in global news outlets including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Time Magazine.
Jarod holds a BS in Biochemistry and Chemistry from Colorado College, a PhD in Genetics from Stanford University, and completed postdoctoral training in AI and functional genomics at Stanford University and EMBL Heidelberg.
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Kevin is a hybrid operator-investor intrigued by next-gen technologies. He serves as COO of both Starbloom and Amaranth. In his role at Starbloom, he concurrently served as Head of Operations at Etherealize, aiming to connect Wall Street to Ethereum. Prior to Starbloom, Kevin was the Chief of Staff to Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga), incubating and investing in companies building in AI, consumer internet, and gaming. Earlier in his career, he was a product manager at Homebase (B2B SaaS), a management consultant at Boston Consulting Group (BCG), and an M&A investment banker at Citigroup.
Kevin holds a BA in Economics from Harvard University and an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Advisory Board
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Martin is the CSO of Gordian Biotechnology, which develops pooled in vivo therapeutic screening to find effective therapies against underserved diseases of aging. He is also the president of the Norn Group, a non-profit supporting projects to accelerate aging research, including Impetus Grants and the Longevity Apprenticeship.
Prior to his current role, Martin was a K99 Fellow in the Jasper Lab at the Buck Institute, where he conducted research on a range of cellular mechanisms involved in aging, such as mitochondrial function, NAD metabolism, DNA damage signaling, and stress responses. Martin received his PhD in Biogerontology from the National Institute of Aging and University of Copenhagen in Vilhelm Bohr’s lab.
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Aaron is the CEO of Revel Pharmaceuticals, which develops repair based therapies for aging and disease. He co-founded Revel in 2019 to focus on clearing the excess accumulation of toxic proteins and metabolites implicated in aging.
Before Revel, Aaron worked at Google X and consulted for various biotech companies. Aaron has over eight years of experience in Revel’s platform technologies of enzyme discovery and engineering, and received his PhD in Bioengineering from Stanford University advised by Dr. Christina Smolke. Aaron holds a bachelors of mathematics from the University of Rochester.
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Alex joined Laura Deming to build the next evolution of the Longevity Fund, called age1, as General Partner, to invest in and catalyze ambitious founder-led longevity biotech companies.
Previously he was Chief of Staff at the Amaranth Foundation where he built out the longevity focus of the family office. Alex completed his PhD in Genetics at Stanford University in Tom Rando's lab studying the biology of aging after having worked in Boston in management consulting at Putnam Associates, a boutique life sciences consulting firm.
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Laura is a cofounder and Venture Partner of age1 and was previously the founder and General Partner of The Longevity Fund. Her work focuses on human life extension and using biological research to reduce the effects of aging.
Laura took graduate coursework at UCSF before going to MIT to study physics, which she eventually dropped out of to become a Thiel Fellow. She’s worked in the Kenyon, Guarente, Weiss and Firestein labs on a number of topics, including aging and synthetic biology. Laura founded the Longevity Fund in 2011, the first VC firm dedicated to funding longevity companies, which raised $37M and has had 5 IPOs with portfolio companies raising over a billion dollars in follow-on funding. The Longevity Fund has backed leading longevity biotechs including Loyal, Gordian, Fauna Biotech, Spring Discovery, Arda Therapeutics, and Rubedo Life Sciences.
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Kristen is the co-founder and CEO of BioAge, a clinical-stage biotechnology company developing a pipeline of therapies to extend healthy lifespan by targeting the molecular causes of aging.
Kristen’s scientific background is in aging biology and bioinformatics. She received her PhD in Medical Biophysics from the University of Toronto, followed by postdoctoral training at Stanford University, where she was a fellow of the Ellison Medical Foundation & American Federation for Aging Research. She is an advisor to multiple biotechnology companies. In 2023, Fierce Pharma named Kristen as one of the most influential people in biopharma.
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Adam is the CEO of Convergent Research, launching Focused Research Organizations (FROs), such as E11 bio and Cultivarium. He also serves on the boards of several non-profits pursuing new methods of funding and organizing scientific research including Norn Group, New Science, and Amaranth.
Previously, he was a Schmidt Futures Innovation Fellow, a consultant for the Astera Institute, a Fellow with the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), a research scientist at Google DeepMind, Chief Strategy Officer of the brain-computer interface company Kernel, a research scientist at MIT, a PhD student in biophysics with George Church and colleagues at Harvard, and a theoretical physics student at Yale. He also previously helped to start companies like BioBright, and advised foundations such as the Open Philanthropy Project. His work has been recognized with a Technology Review 35 Innovators Under 35 Award (2018), a Fannie and John Hertz Foundation Fellowship (2010) and a Goldwater Scholarship (2008).
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