Thomas Hartung, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University.
He's the leading academic architect of 'Organoid Intelligence' — using lab-grown clusters of brain cells as computing hardware.
He was lead author of the 2023 Organoid Intelligence manifesto in Frontiers in Science, founded the Johns Hopkins OI Initiative, and holds a foundational 'BrainSpheres' patent licensed to the company AxoSim; his roadmap is to scale these mini-brains from 50,000 to 10 million neurons, arguing they could hit huge computing power on just 20 watts.
The engine reads him as the person defining this emerging field, making him central to any push to merge biology with computing.