Joshua Elliott
Chief Scientist
Joshua Elliott is the Chief Scientist of Renaissance Philanthropy.
Joshua has been driving innovation in science and technology for more than 15 years in academia, government, and philanthropy. Most recently Joshua spent time as a Programme Director at Quadrature Climate Foundation (leading strategies on solar radiation management, CO2 removals and vulnerability and resilience), launched a non-profit science accelerator program called Brains, created a skunkworks to accelerate innovation within Project InnerSpace and incubated the ARC initiative to accelerate responsible translational R&D to address future climate emergencies.
Before that he spent 6 years at DARPA as a Program Manager in the Information Innovation Office where he programmed almost $600M in federal R&D funding. At DARPA he created, ran, and transitioned programs generally in the area of “AI for Science” (computational science, data science, climate science, water/food/conflict, synthetic biology, epidemiology, systems biology, etc.). Tangential obsessions led to additional efforts in domains such as Artificial Social Intelligence, AI for education, machine-assisted complex systems analysis and planning, optimal multi-species teaming (think canines+humans+drones), AI to advance discovery of critical minerals and natural hydrogen, and hybrid collective intelligent networks to reimagine institutional structures to optimize information flow and decision-making.
Prior to that Joshua spent almost 10 years in academia doing computational climate economics and energy systems modeling, climate extremes, and climate impacts in hydrology, agriculture, migration and conflict (at the University of Chicago and Argonne National Lab). He co-founded the center for Robust Decision-making in Climate and Energy Policy at U. Chicago, started the Global Gridded Crop Modeling Intercomparison Project, and launched an ag-focused climate informatics startup. Joshua received a PhD in theoretical high-energy physics from McGill University.