Thomas Ray, PhD

Thomas Ray, Scientific Founder: Dr. Ray is an evolutionary biologist, iconoclast, and polymath who has made seminal contributions to multiple fields of science. His paradigm-shifting work has been featured in dozens of media outlets, including Time Magazine, The New York Times, and Wired. Enrolling in university at the age of 16, as an undergraduate he was already publishing in the journal Science about new phenomena of nature he discovered with the natural history method. He brought the same natural history approach to the field of artificial life; with no training in computer science, he designed a new CPU architecture, a new operating system, and a new machine language. He created the first known instance of evolution by natural selection apart from life on earth - the first true artificial life program. For the past two decades, he has devoted his research to the natural history study of psychoactivity, synthesizing human experience data and biochemical data to develop hypotheses concerning the biological basis of the diverse varieties of psychoactive drug effects. Dr. Ray holds a PhD in Biology from Harvard University.