O'Shaughnessy Ventures

Most films capture a performance from one angle at a time. @dimitrivallein surrounds his actors with about 200 synchronized cameras and reconstructs them in three dimensions, so you can walk around the performance instead of watching it from a fixed seat.

He's using it to finish The Day I Met You, a science fiction short that brings quantum physics into an intimate story about love, choice and the nature of reality. It's built for cinema screens and for virtual reality. Over the next year he'll complete it and pursue an international festival premiere.

His animated shorts have earned more than 40 international festival selections. Before this he built augmented reality work for Netflix and Dua Lipa that drew hundreds of millions of views. He's now building Revery, an entertainment company making original stories for film, games and immersive formats.

"I want to make beautiful films that bring our most extraordinary scientific and philosophical ideas into popular culture."

He's the twenty-third O'Shaughnessy Fellow we've announced in 2026.

Machines can see. They can hear. They can't smell.

Alistair Pernigo is working on that. He researches how machines detect and interpret the chemical signals around them, or as he puts it, making chemistry a native sense for machines.

He's a research affiliate in the Multisensory Intelligence group at the MIT Media Lab, where he works on machine olfaction and molecular sensing. He co-authored SmellNet, a public dataset for smell recognition covering 50 substances and 43 mixtures across roughly 828,000 data points, published at ICLR earlier this year. He also co-founded Timeless Way, a lab studying how living and engineered systems perceive their environments.

He has a working sensing prototype. Over the next year he'll develop it further and validate it through controlled experiments with academic collaborators. The applications are robotics, industrial safety and biosecurity.

"I'm excited to build alongside people who recognize strange ideas as early signals of what comes next."

He's the twenty-second O'Shaughnessy Fellow we've announced in 2026.

Allison Paradise built a sustainability standard for scientific labs. It's now used in more than 60 countries and the UN-backed Race to Zero campaign adopted it as a measure of progress.

She's doing the same thing for classrooms.

Allison is building the Consciousness Education Certification, an online course that trains K-12 teachers to develop children's curiosity, creativity, compassion and connection. The method comes out of her neuroscience background: visual art, writing, dance and music, paired with reflection and time outdoors. She's already been running it in public schools, where students reported more confidence, less anxiety and stronger friendships. Over the next year she'll certify 100 teachers, reaching more than 2,000 children.

She's CEO of The Epicenter, holds a master's in neuroscience from Harvard and a bachelor's from Brown.

"Our education system was built for a world that no longer exists. Allison's work prepares young people for the one they actually live in." — Jim O'Shaughnessy

She's the twenty-first O'Shaughnessy Fellow we've announced in 2026.

Your cells are running on electricity. Not metaphorically. They use electrical signals to tell each other how to heal, grow and rebuild.

Wiktoria Pawlak (@wiktoriapawlak_) is building an AI to read that language. Most research examines those signals one at a time. Her model looks for patterns across time, which is where you can actually see how tissue organizes itself as it recovers.

The point of all this is electroceuticals: therapies that treat disease with electrical signals instead of drugs. Over the next year she'll build a proof of concept that can tell healthy tissue from diseased, predict how it will change, and identify which patterns matter most. She's starting with cancer.

She has an MEng in bioengineering from Berkeley, built a computer-vision system for cardiac-cell microscopy, and modeled how glial cells shift electrically as they turn into glioblastoma. Forbes Women Poland named her one of 26 women to watch this year.

"Some ideas ask us not to be certain, but not to be afraid."

She's the twentieth O'Shaughnessy Fellow we've announced in 2026.

Most bug repellents were built for mosquitoes. They stop working the moment a tick reaches your skin.

Joseph Beyene is building one that doesn't. His skin treatment targets the biological process ticks rely on to feed, an approach no product on the market takes directly.

He started with a sociology degree from Berkeley, then a master's in molecular biology, then a PhD from Harvard's School of Public Health, where his research became the foundational science behind Vesigen Therapeutics. He teaches drug development at Northeastern.

Over the next year he'll run independent field trials of his lead formulation.

"I envision a world where people and animals can live safely, protected from tick-borne diseases."

He's our nineteenth O'Shaughnessy Fellow of 2026.