Meet the 2025 Brains Fellows

We’re excited to introduce the 2025 class of Brains Fellows!

As a reminder, the Brains is a research accelerator that helps talented scientists and technologists execute on ambitious ideas that are beyond the scope of individual academic labs, startups, or large companies.

If you find any of their ideas particularly exciting or intriguing, please get in touch with them via LinkedIn (linked to in their names) or email brains@spec.tech and we’ll route you correctly.

Alina Chan

Alina is building an atlas of research that can cause pandemics, with the objective of partnering with governments, funding agencies, policy organizations, advocacy groups, and other important stakeholders to track and regulate such activities. This project will solve the key challenge of low visibility into risky pathogen research and empower data-driven prevention and surveillance of both natural and research-related outbreaks. It will establish a new way of collecting, organizing, and generating complex and holistic scientific knowledge, with a central mission to protect the world against future laboratory-based outbreaks.

About Alina

Alina Chan, Ph.D., was a scientific advisor and viral vector engineer at the Broad Institute of MIT & Harvard. She is a recent Broad Ignite fellow and Human Frontier Science Program fellow with a background in medical genetics, synthetic biology, and genetic engineering. During the pandemic, Dr. Chan investigated problems relevant to finding the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and co-authored Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19 with Matt Ridley. In 2022, she joined the Pathogens Project Taskforce organized by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to generate new thinking on responsible high-risk pathogen research.

Blake Courter

Blake Courter is building open source engineering tools that work more effectively with modern data science. Engineering innovation has become stifled by fragmentation across design, simulation, and manufacturing, whose siloed, proprietary databases fail to model or include customer need and design intent. If we can make engineering knowledge universally computable, we remove the bottleneck between engineering and AI, unlocking generative mechanical engineering.

About Blake

Blake Courter has led innovation in engineering software for three decades. As CTO and Head of Product at nTop, he established the category of field-driven, generative implicit design. As founder of SpaceClaim (now ANSYS Discovery), he created the first interactive direct editing CAD system, an approach later adopted across the industry. At GrabCAD, he developed the first cloud-based collaborative PDM system, growing the user community to 8M users. Currently, through Gradient