Basis is a nonprofit applied research organization with two mutually reinforcing goals.

Basis is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit applied research organization with two mutually reinforcing goals.

The first is to understand and build intelligence. This means to establish the mathematical principles of what it means to reason, to learn, to make decisions, to understand, and to explain; and to construct software that implements these principles.

The second is to advance society’s ability to solve intractable problems. This means expanding the scale, complexity, and breadth of problems that we can solve today, and even more importantly, accelerating our ability to solve problems in the future.

To achieve these goals, we’re building both a new technological foundation that draws inspiration from how humans reason, and a new kind of collaborative organization that puts human values first.

Our Team

Between our core members, advisors, and collaborators, Basis is made up of:

Zenna Tavares ↗︎

Zenna Tavares is a co-founder and director of Basis. Tavares’s research aims to understand how humans reason, that is, how they come to derive knowledge from observing and interacting with the world. He constructs computational and statistical tools that help advance his work on causal reasoning, probabilistic programming, and other areas.

Eli Bingham ↗︎

Eli Bingham is a co-founder and director of Basis, a machine learning fellow in the Data Sciences Platform at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, a co-creator and core developer of the Pyro probabilistic programming language, and formerly a senior research scientist at Uber AI Labs. He focuses on research at the intersection of probabilistic machine learning, programming languages, and biology and on bringing that research to practice by delivering high-quality open-source software to many thousands of users.

Emily Mackevicius ↗︎

Emily Mackevicius is a co-founder and director of Basis, where she leads the Collaborative Intelligent Systems group. She did her postdoctoral work studying memory-expert birds in the Aronov lab and the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience at Columbia, and her PhD work studying how birds learn to sing in the Fee lab at MIT. Her theoretical work is strongly grounded in experimental practice, currently high-resolution behavioral recordings of groups of animals foraging in environments ranging from NYC to Arctic Alaska.

Alyse Portera

Alyse Portera is business operations manager at Basis. She has over 20 years of business, human resources and operational management experience in the life sciences, government and non-profit sectors. Alyse was the Regional Director of Research Operations at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and prior to that she was the Deputy Commissioner for Administration at the Westchester County Health Department in New York where she oversaw all finance functions, human resources, facilities management, information technology, emergency preparedness and corporate administrative functions.

Andy Zane ↗︎

Andy Zane is a visiting researcher at Basis and a PhD candidate in UMass Amherst’s College of Information and Computer Sciences. His broad research interests include Bayesian modeling, causality, and decision theory, while recent efforts have explored ways optimal experimental design can mitigate false accusations in police lineups. Previously, he led development of business intelligence and industrial automation tools in the natural resource industries, and still consults in this sector.

Anna Hidalgo

Anna Hidalgo is an operations consultant (part time) at Basis. She is helping the organization to grow its capacity and general operations. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology (Columbia University), with subfield specialities in cultural sociology, gender, sexuality, and race.

Archana Warrier ↗︎

Archana Warrier is a research trainee at Basis and a Master’s student at TU Kaiserslautern, co-mentored by Zenna Tavares and Sebastian Vollmer. Her interests lie in the fields of causality and Bayesian inference.

Dan Waxman ↗︎

Dan Waxman is a postdoctoral fellow at Basis, supervised by Matt Levine at Basis and Youssef Marzouk at MIT. His interests include probabilistic machine learning and causal inference, broadly interpreted, with a particular focus on sequential inference and dynamical systems. He completed his PhD in Electrical Engineering at Stony Brook University, where his dissertation addressed sequential Bayesian inference for online ensembles, decentralized learning, and scalable experimental design.

Dat Nguyen ↗︎

Dat Nguyen is a joint postdoctoral fellow at Basis and at Nada Amin’s lab at Harvard, where he explores the intersection of programming languages and AI. He previously pursued a PhD at the University of Melbourne, leveraging graph modeling and program synthesis to improve deep learning models.

Dmitry Batenkov ↗︎

Dima Batenkov is a research scientist at Basis. He was previously an assistant professor of applied mathematics at Tel-Aviv University and a postdoctoral fellow at MIT.

Francis Northwood

Francis Northwood is an operations associate at Basis. He is also a writer and researcher interested in finance, real estate, and architecture. His writing can be found in the San Francisco Chronicle, The Baffler, and The Drift.

Fritz Obermeyer ↗︎

Fritz Obermeyer is a research scientist (part-time) at Basis. He works on Pyro and specializes in Bayesian machine learning. He earned a PhD in Programming Language Theory and has worked on machine learning platforms at Salesforce, Google, and Uber. Currently, he is researching applications of large language models to decision making.

Jack Feser ↗︎

Jack Feser is a research scientist at Basis. He was previously an assistant professor of computer science at Hamilton College and completed his Ph.D. at MIT with Armando Solar-Lezama. His research interests are in programming languages and automated programming, particularly as applied to relational databases.

Jean Yoo ↗︎

Jean Yoo is a research trainee at Basis and an incoming master’s student at Brown University (Fall 2026). Her research interests broadly lie in visual computing and AI: developing systems that can reason about the visual world and generate and edit visual data, leveraging neurosymbolic methods to approach these problems.

Karen Schroeder ↗︎

Karen Schroeder is research operations manager at Basis. She was previously a postdoctoral research scientist in brain-computer interfaces and computational/systems neuroscience at Columbia’s Zuckerman Institute, and holds a Ph.D. in neural engineering from the University of Michigan. Her research interests include neuroAI, neurotechnology, and meta-science for AI research.

Kiran Gopinathan ↗︎

Kiran Gopinathan is a research scientist at Basis. She previously completed her postdoc with Talia Ringer at UIUC, and before that earned her PhD in Programming Languages Research from the National University of Singapore on automating the maintenance of formally verified software. Her research interests cover formal verification, program synthesis, type systems, language design and proof engineering.

Martin Jankowiak ↗︎

Martin Jankowiak is a research scientist (part-time) at Basis, a machine learning fellow in the Data Sciences Platform at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and a co-creator and core developer of Pyro and NumPyro. He was previously a senior research scientist at Uber AI Labs and has a PhD in theoretical physics from Stanford. He works on a wide range of topics across probabilistic machine learning, high-dimensional statistics and applications in computational biology.

Matt Levine ↗︎

Matt Levine is a research scientist at Basis. He studies methodologies at the intersection of machine learning, dynamical systems, and uncertainty quantification, with the goal of improving prediction and inference in biological and physical systems. He is especially interested in approaches that integrate mechanistic and data-driven modeling, and that scale to real, messy data. Matt holds a PhD from Caltech and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Broad Institute’s Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center.

Michelangelo Naim ↗︎

Michi Naim is a research scientist at Basis. He was previously an ICoN Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT working with Guangyu Robert Yang using AI to model the brain. He finished his Ph.D. at the Weizmann Institute of Science under supervision of Misha Tsodyks, during which he spent some time at the Institute for Advanced Studies and at Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics.

Rafal Urbaniak ↗︎

Rafal Urbaniak is a research scientist at Basis, specializing in Bayesian methods and causal probabilistic programming. His interests include criminal evidence evaluation, bias in natural language processing, and online aggression. At Basis, he develops advanced tools for causal explanation to inform policy-making decisions and identify collaboration strategies in animal behavior. Rafal holds a Ph.D. in Logic and Philosophy of Mathematics from the University of Calgary and has held positions at the Research Foundation Flanders, Trinity College Dublin, and the University of Bristol.

Ralph Peterson ↗︎

Ralph Peterson is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Basis, where he develops multi-agent models to study animal behavior. He is currently conducting fieldwork on collective behavior in NYC’s urban rat populations. Ralph earned his PhD in Neural Science from NYU, where he investigated vocal communication and auditory processing in social rodents using computational neuroethological approaches. Prior to his PhD, he developed quantitative methods for analyzing animal behavior at Harvard Medical School.

Ravi Deedwania

Ravi Deedwania is an operations consultant at Basis. He has previously worked as a product manager at venture-backed startups and a research assistant at the White House Council of Economic Advisors. He has an S.B. in economics from MIT and a JD from Yale Law School.

Tim Cooijmans ↗︎

Tim Cooijmans is a research scientist at Basis. His research focuses on the dynamics and stability of gradient-based learning, particularly in challenging systems such as recurrent and attentive neural networks and multi-agent reinforcement learning. He holds a PhD from Mila. Tim has previously worked on radiation simulation tooling at CERN, on music generation at Google Brain’s Magenta and on approximate automatic differentiation at DeepMind.

Tom O’Connell ↗︎

Tom O’Connell is collaborating with Basis while on sabbatical from his position as an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Skidmore College. He completed a Ph.D. in Computer Science at The University at Albany under the direction of Richard Stearns. His dissertation applied theoretical computer science to bounded rationality and mechanism design. Previously he was a Systems Software Developer at IBM.

Yair Shenfeld ↗︎

Yair Shenfeld is a research scientist (part-time) at Basis. He is an assistant professor of applied mathematics at Brown University. Currently he works on generative modeling and optimal transport.

Yichao Liang ↗︎

Yichao Liang is a research intern at Basis and a PhD student at the Computational and Biological Learning Lab (CBL) at Cambridge, supervised by Adrian Weller. He also collaborates closely with amazing people from the Computational Cognitive Science group (CoCoSci) at MIT and the Visual Geometry Group (VGG) at Oxford. His research focuses on the complementary goals of developing generally competent embodied agents (AGI) and understanding human intelligence.

Yixiu Zhao

Yixiu Zhao is a research engineer at Basis. He holds an applied physics Ph.D. from Stanford University, where his research focused on probabilistic inference and generative models. Yixiu is broadly interested in how humans and AIs understand the world by building abstractions from observation and interaction.

Want to work with us? Learn more about opportunities to join our research collaborations, and career opportunities, here.

Advisors

Armando Solar-Lezama ↗︎

Solar-Lezama is a professor at MIT EECS and an associate director and the COO of MIT CSAIL, where he leads the Computer-Aided Programming Group.

Joshua Tenenbaum ↗︎

Tenenbaum is professor of Computational Cognitive Science in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Scientific Director with the MIT Quest for Intelligence, an investigator at the Center for Brains, Minds and Machines and MIT CSAIL, and a MacArthur Fellow.

Kevin Ellis ↗︎

Ellis is an assistant professor of computer science at Cornell, where his group works on artificial intelligence, deep learning and program synthesis.

Anthony Philippakis ↗︎

Philippakis is chief data officer of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, co-director of the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center for AI and Biology, a venture partner at GV, and a cardiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

Rui Costa ↗︎

Costa is a professor of neuroscience and outgoing CEO of the Zuckerman Institute at Columbia, the incoming CEO of the Allen Institute, and an elected member of the European Molecular Biology Organization and the National Academy of Medicine.

If you are interested in supporting our mission to create a new space for AI research with financial or other resources, or collaborating with us on either core technology or any of our current challenge problems, please reach us at contact@basis.ai.

If you’d like to stay up to date on Basis news, software releases, or challenge problems please join our mailing list.