Sam Rodriques

Sam Rodriques is an American physicist and bioengineer. He is the co-founder and chief executive officer of FutureHouse, the San Francisco AI-for-science nonprofit founded in September 2023 with Andrew White of the University of Rochester and primarily funded by Eric Schmidt. He was previously a group leader at the Francis Crick Institute in London from January 2021 through 2023, where he led the Applied Biotechnology Laboratory, and he completed a PhD in physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2019 in the laboratory of Edward Boyden at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research.

At a glance

• Education: BS in physics, Haverford College (2013), summa cum laude; MPhil in engineering, Churchill College, University of Cambridge (2014), as a Churchill Scholar; PhD in physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2019), under Edward Boyden at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research.
• Current role: Co-founder and chief executive officer of FutureHouse since September 2023; co-founder and director of Edison Scientific since November 2025.
• Key contributions: Lead author of the 2019 Slide-seq paper in Science introducing high-resolution spatial transcriptomics; co-originator with Adam Marblestone of the Focused Research Organization (FRO) model in 2020; group leader of the Applied Biotechnology Laboratory at the Francis Crick Institute from January 2021 through 2023; co-founder of FutureHouse with Andrew White in September 2023; co-founder of Edison Scientific at the November 2025 spinout.
• Recognition: Named to the TIME100 AI 2025 list; Hertz Foundation Graduate Fellow (2013) and 2020 Hertz Thesis Prize; Churchill Scholar (2013); NSF Graduate Research Fellow (2015); STAT Wunderkind (2019).
• X / Twitter: @SGRodriques
• LinkedIn: samuel-g-rodriques-080a9b22
• Personal site: sam-rodriques.com
• Google Scholar: Samuel G. Rodriques

Origins

Rodriques is American. He completed undergraduate study at Haverford College from 2009 through 2013, earning a bachelor of science in physics summa cum laude with high honors. As an undergraduate he worked under physicist Peter Love on quantum-information methods for calculating entanglement in multipartite quantum systems, and spent the 2011 to 2012 academic year abroad at Fitzwilliam College, University of Cambridge studying Part III mathematics and Part II physics under Nilanjana Datta. The undergraduate record produced a Phi Beta Kappa junior election, the Beckman and Goldwater Scholarships, and the Louis Green Prize in Physics at graduation.

In January 2013 Rodriques was named both a Churchill Scholar and a Hertz Fellow. The Churchill Scholarship funded a master of philosophy in engineering at Churchill College, University of Cambridge from 2013 through 2014 advised by Daniel Wolpert, the computational neuroscientist then at Cambridge. The Hertz Fellowship and a subsequent NSF Graduate Research Fellowship funded the PhD in physics at MIT from 2014 through 2019.

The MIT doctorate was conducted in the laboratory of Edward Boyden at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research and the Synthetic Neurobiology Group, with cross-affiliations to the MIT Media Lab and the Broad Institute. The thesis, "Mapping Cell Types, Dynamics, and Connections in Neural Circuits," won the 2020 Hertz Thesis Prize. The principal artifact of the doctoral period is the 2019 Slide-seq paper in Science with Robert Stickels, Fei Chen, Evan Macosko, and others, which introduced a scalable spatial-transcriptomics technology with 10 micron resolution and became the reference method for spatially resolved tissue gene-expression mapping.

Career

After completing the MIT PhD in May 2019, Rodriques served as an entrepreneur in residence at Petri, the Boston biotech accelerator, from April 2020 through January 2021. He was named a Regeneron Prize for Outstanding Postdoctoral Research finalist in 2020 and a STAT Wunderkind in 2019.

In summer 2020, in parallel with the Petri residency, Rodriques co-developed the Focused Research Organization (FRO) concept with Boyden-lab colleagues Adam Marblestone and Andrew Payne. The FRO proposal first appeared in chapter 8 of the MIT thesis and described an organizational model for nonprofit research entities focused on a single basic-science or technology problem, organized like a startup, and independent of universities or industrial labs. Three FROs received initial funding from Schmidt Futures and Astera in October 2021, and the model has since attracted commitments from more than thirty philanthropic and government funders.

In January 2021 Rodriques established the Applied Biotechnology Laboratory at the Francis Crick Institute in London as group leader. The Crick laboratory continued the spatial-transcriptomics, brain-mapping, and gene-therapy research lines from the MIT period and developed platform technology for cell-type and circuit mapping at single-cell resolution, oriented toward identifying subtypes of schizophrenia and depression. The Crick group-leader role ran into 2023 and bridged the academic-bioengineering output of the MIT period and the AI-for-science thesis of the FutureHouse founding.

In September 2023 Rodriques co-founded FutureHouse with Andrew White, associate professor of chemical engineering at the University of Rochester and the developer of the first large-language-model agent for chemistry. The pair had connected in late 2022 after the release of GPT-3.5 around shared interest in foundation models for scientific research, with White as head of science and Rodriques as chief executive. The founding agenda is to build autonomous AI scientists for biology research, structured as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in the FRO mold and primarily funded by Eric Schmidt personally. The team grew to approximately twenty researchers in the first two years.

The May 2025 launch of the FutureHouse Platform introduced four named AI agents: Crow, a general-purpose literature-search agent; Falcon, a deep-literature-review agent; Owl, an experiment-prior-art agent; and Phoenix, an experimental ChemCrow deployment for chemistry-experiment planning. June 2025 added ether0, a 24-billion-parameter open-weights reasoning model for chemistry. The 2025 product cadence positioned FutureHouse alongside Isomorphic Labs, EvolutionaryScale, Inceptive, and Lila Sciences in industry coverage of AI-for-science research organizations.

In November 2025 FutureHouse spun out Edison Scientific as the commercial vehicle for the AI-scientist platform, with Rodriques as a co-founder and director. Edison launched the Kosmos AI-scientist agent in November 2025, which the company has characterized as capable of executing the equivalent of six months of postdoctoral research in a single twelve-hour run. In December 2025 Edison raised a $70 million seed round at a $250 million valuation, co-led by Spark Capital and Triatomic Capital, with angel participation from Google chief scientist Jeff Dean and CrowdStrike co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch.

Affiliations

• MIT McGovern Institute for Brain Research: PhD researcher in the Boyden Synthetic Neurobiology Group, 2014 to 2019.
• Petri: Entrepreneur in residence, April 2020 to January 2021.
• Francis Crick Institute: Group leader, Applied Biotechnology Laboratory, January 2021 to 2023.
• FutureHouse: Co-founder and chief executive officer, September 2023 to present.
• Edison Scientific: Co-founder and director, November 2025 to present.

Notable contributions

Rodriques's public output spans bioengineering research at MIT and Crick, the Focused Research Organization model, and the AI-for-science platform at FutureHouse and Edison Scientific.

• Slide-seq: A scalable technology for measuring genome-wide expression at high spatial resolution (Science, 2019). Lead author with collaborators at the Broad Institute and MIT. Slide-seq introduced bead-array spatial-transcriptomics with approximately 10 micron resolution and became a reference platform for spatial-transcriptomics research, extended in the 2020 Slide-seqV2 paper in Nature Biotechnology.
• Focused Research Organizations to Accelerate Science, Technology, and Medicine (2021). Co-authored with Adam Marblestone, Andrew Payne, and Tom Kalil at the Federation of American Scientists. The FRO model has shaped science-funding architecture at Schmidt Futures, Astera, and the National Science Foundation.
• PaperQA (December 2023). Co-author with Jakub Lála, Odhran O'Donoghue, Aleksandar Shtedritski, Sam Cox, and Andrew White on the retrieval-augmented generative-agent paper that introduced FutureHouse's first public AI-for-science system. PaperQA matched expert human researchers on the LitQA benchmark.
• Language agents achieve superhuman synthesis of scientific knowledge (September 2024). FutureHouse paper documenting that language-agent systems exceed expert humans on scientific-literature-synthesis tasks.
• FutureHouse Platform (May 2025). Launched the four named AI-scientist agents Crow, Falcon, Owl, and Phoenix as the first public-API autonomous-research-agent products from FutureHouse.
• ether0 (June 2025). Co-released open-weights 24-billion-parameter reasoning model for chemistry with Andrew White, characterized as the first reasoning-trained model in a scientific domain.
• Kosmos (November 2025). Edison Scientific autonomous-discovery AI scientist with seven reported discoveries across neuroscience, materials science, and clinical genetics in the launch period.
• Public-talk record. What we'll learn about the brain in the next century on TEDxBeaconStreet (2018); Inside the lab training AI to cure diseases Freethink Interview (September 2025); Building an AI Scientist at the AI X Bio Workshop 2025; A.I. Scientists Are Here. But Is Progress Accelerating? on Hard Fork with Kevin Roose and Casey Newton (December 2025); Scaling Biology 003 on the Decoding Bio podcast (January 2025).

Investments and boards

The entries below are limited to AI, semiconductors, datacenters, software, and energy.

• FutureHouse (AI): Co-founder and chief executive officer, September 2023 to present. San Francisco-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit AI-for-science research laboratory. Primarily funded by Eric Schmidt; specific cumulative funding not publicly disclosed.
• Edison Scientific (AI): Co-founder and director, November 2025 to present. FutureHouse commercial spinout building the Kosmos AI-scientist platform. Raised a $70 million seed round in December 2025 at a $250 million valuation, co-led by Spark Capital and Triatomic Capital.

No other public investor activity on record in AI, semiconductors, datacenters, software, or energy as of May 2026.

Network

Rodriques's longest-running professional collaboration is with Andrew White, his FutureHouse co-founder. The pair connected in late 2022 around shared interest in language-model agents for scientific research, with White contributing the chemistry-LLM agent line (ChemCrow, ether0) and Rodriques contributing the bioengineering record from MIT and Crick. The FutureHouse research staff includes Sam Cox, Jakub Lála, Odhran O'Donoghue, and Aleksandar Shtedritski as PaperQA co-authors and Edison Scientific founding researchers.

His MIT graduate-school cohort produced the Focused Research Organization model with Adam Marblestone, then a postdoctoral fellow in the Boyden lab and now chief executive of the Convergent Research FRO incubator, and Andrew Payne, formerly a Boyden-lab PhD student. The MIT doctoral advising relationship with Edward Boyden anchors the neurotechnology-research network. The Slide-seq collaboration produced lasting research partnerships with Fei Chen and Evan Macosko at the Broad Institute.

The Eric Schmidt and Schmidt Sciences funding relationship is the principal financial anchor for the FutureHouse operation. Among AI-for-science peer founders, his position runs in parallel with Demis Hassabis at Isomorphic Labs, the leadership at EvolutionaryScale and Inceptive, and Lila Sciences, and shares the AI-for-physical-sciences frame with Liam Fedus at Periodic Labs and Vik Bajaj at Project Prometheus.

Position in the field

As of May 2026, Rodriques occupies a structurally distinctive position among AI-for-science chief executives through the combination of the Haverford-physics-to-MIT-McGovern doctoral path, the Slide-seq spatial-transcriptomics lead authorship, the Crick Institute group-leader credential, the Focused Research Organization model authorship, and the AI-scientist platform at FutureHouse and Edison Scientific.

Industry coverage has consistently characterized FutureHouse under his leadership as one of the principal nonprofit AI-for-science research organizations globally, alongside Isomorphic Labs, EvolutionaryScale, Inceptive, and Lila Sciences. The May 2025 FutureHouse Platform release positioned the lab as the first public-API autonomous-research-agent provider, and the November 2025 Edison Scientific spinout and December 2025 $70 million seed round established a commercial counterpart to the nonprofit research operation in the FRO-plus-spinout model.

The bioengineer-to-AI-research-executive arc is unusual among contemporary AI-lab founders. Most peer chief executives in frontier AI laboratories have come from machine-learning research backgrounds, and most peer chief executives in AI-for-science laboratories have come from drug-discovery or computational-biology backgrounds. Rodriques's wet-lab spatial-transcriptomics record at MIT and Crick is the principal point of difference, alongside the FRO institutional-design contribution that shaped the funding architecture for the broader AI-for-science cohort.

Outlook

Open questions over the next 6 to 18 months:

• Edison Scientific funding cadence. Whether Edison Scientific raises a Series A in 2026, the lead investor and valuation, and the capital-deployment plan for the Kosmos platform.
• Kosmos discovery cadence. The publication and validation cadence of new Kosmos-platform discoveries beyond the seven cited at the November 2025 launch, and the magnitude of the capability claim relative to peer AI-scientist systems.
• FutureHouse research output. Continued cadence of autonomous-research-agent system releases and published research output from the FutureHouse nonprofit relative to the Edison Scientific commercial operation.
• Schmidt-affiliated funding trajectory. Continued personal commitment from Eric Schmidt and Schmidt Sciences participation as FutureHouse expands operating scope.
• Senior-talent recruitment cadence. Continued movement of bioengineering, chemistry, and AI-research staff into the FutureHouse and Edison Scientific organizations.
• Public-commentary cadence. Frequency and substance of conference appearances, technical publications, and AI-for-science policy positions as the FutureHouse-Edison Scientific structure matures.

Sources

• Sam Rodriques personal site. Personal-site biography covering research interests, the FRO concept origin, and the Edison Scientific co-founding.
• Sam Rodriques CV. Personal-site CV documenting education from Haverford through MIT and the Petri and Crick employment dates.
• Samuel G. Rodriques on LinkedIn. Public LinkedIn profile with the FutureHouse, Edison Scientific, Crick, MIT, and Cambridge chronology.
• Samuel Rodriques on the Hertz Foundation site. Hertz Foundation fellow profile documenting the 2013 Hertz Fellowship and 2020 Thesis Prize.
• Samuel Rodriques '13 Named Hertz Fellow. Haverford College January 2013 announcement of the Churchill Scholarship and Hertz Fellowship.
• Sam Rodriques | Crick. Francis Crick Institute researcher profile documenting the Applied Biotechnology Laboratory group-leader role.
• Slide-seq: A scalable technology for measuring genome-wide expression at high spatial resolution. 2019 Science paper with Rodriques as lead author and Fei Chen and Evan Macosko among co-authors.
• PaperQA: Retrieval-Augmented Generative Agent for Scientific Research. December 2023 arXiv preprint introducing the FutureHouse PaperQA system, with Rodriques among the co-authors.
• Language agents achieve superhuman synthesis of scientific knowledge. September 2024 FutureHouse paper on language-agent literature-synthesis performance.
• Launching the FutureHouse Platform. May 2025 FutureHouse announcement of the Crow, Falcon, Owl, and Phoenix AI-scientist agents.
• Kosmos: An AI Scientist for Autonomous Discovery. November 2025 Edison Scientific arXiv preprint describing the Kosmos AI-scientist system.
• We Raised $70M to Accelerate Science. December 2025 Edison Scientific announcement of the $70 million seed round at a $250 million valuation.
• FutureHouse Spins Out Edison Scientific, Launches Kosmos AI for Research. November 2025 AIwire coverage of the Edison Scientific spinout and Kosmos launch.
• Sam Rodriques: The 100 Most Influential People in AI 2025. TIME100 AI 2025 entry profiling Rodriques and the FutureHouse mission.
• Focused Research Organizations to Accelerate Science, Technology, and Medicine. Federation of American Scientists publication of the FRO proposal with Rodriques as co-author.
• Former MIT researchers advance a new model for innovation. MIT News profile of the FRO-model origin in the Boyden lab.
• Accelerating scientific discovery with AI. MIT News June 2025 profile of FutureHouse, with details on the Rodriques and White founding partnership.
• Inside the lab training AI to cure diseases. Freethink Interview with Rodriques on FutureHouse, September 2025.
• Scaling Biology 003: Sam Rodriques, Co-Founder and CEO at FutureHouse. January 2025 Decoding Bio podcast covering the founding thesis and bioengineering background.
• Photo: Sam Rodriques at FutureHouse, FutureHouse team page.