Sam Rodriques, an alum of the Synthetic Neurobiology research group, has been recognized in the Innovators category of the TIME100 AI 2025 list.

Dr. Rodriques co-founded the nonprofit FutureHouse in 2023, with the aim of giving scientists new tools to break through bottlenecks and improve their workflows. To that end, FutureHouse is developing AI agents that can formulate hypotheses, conduct experiments, and analyze data by themselves. In May, the organization announced that its agents had helped to discover a promising new treatment for dry age-related macular disease (AMD), a major cause of blindness; the paper, which is available as a pre-print, has not yet been peer-reviewed. 

“It’s like being a professor today: you have a bunch of graduate students working with you," Dr. Rodriques told TIME. "They go do some work, come back, you provide them updates. I think it will be like that, just much faster, where every scientist will have their own lab of agents.”