Ramez Naam

Ramez Naam was born in Cairo, Egypt, and came to the US at the age of 3. He's a computer scientist, futurist, and award-winning author. Naam spent 13 years at Microsoft, where he led teams developing early versions of Microsoft Outlook, Internet Explorer, and the Bing search engine. His career has focused on bringing advanced collaboration, communication, and information retrieval capabilities to roughly one billion people around the world, and took him to the role of Partner and Director of Program Management within Microsoft, with deep experience leading teams working on cutting edge technologies such as machine learning, search, massive scale services, and artificial intelligence. Between stints at Microsoft, Naam founded and ran Apex NanoTechnologies, the world's first company devoted entirely to software tools to accelerate molecular design. He holds 19 patents related to search engines, information retrieval, web browsing, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. Naam was the recipient of the 2005 HG Wells Award for Contributions to Transhumanism, and was a nominee for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2014. Naam lectures on energy, environment, and innovation at Singularity University, where he serves as Adjunct Faculty. He's spoken to audiences on four continents, from Illinois to Istanbul and from corporate boardrooms to Harvard University. He's appeared on Sunday morning MSNBC, repeatedly on Yahoo! Finance, on China Cable Television, on BigThink, and Reuters.fm. His work has appeared in, or been reviewed by, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, Slate, Business Week, Business Insider, Discover, Popular Science, Wired, and Scientific American. He's a graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign and the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy at Aurora Illinois. In his leisure, Ramez has climbed mountains, descended into icy crevasses, chased sharks through their native domain, backpacked through remote corners of China, and ridden his bicycle down hundreds of miles of the Vietnam coast. He lives in Seattle with his partner Mollie, where he writes and speaks full time.