Dr Danilo Jimenez Rezende and Dr Matej Macak to lead EIT’s AI & Robotics Institute

The Ellison Institute of Technology (EIT) has announced that Dr Danilo Jimenez Rezende and Dr Matej Macak will lead EIT’s AI & Robotics Institute (AIR), effective from 1 July, 2026.

Danilo, Executive Director & Principal Scientist, and Matej, Executive Director & Executive Vice President, have both played central roles in shaping AIR’s work over the last two years and will now lead AIR together.  

AIR’s next phase will focus on bringing AI and robotics even closer to the scientific challenges EIT is working to solve. Their mission is to connect powerful AI models and frontier robotics to make biological matter computable and testable, at scale by any scientist, with a focus on three key areas: LifeAI Molecular Models Simulations and Design, LifeAI Autonomous Labs and LifeAI Platform. It is an approach that reflects EIT’s wider ambition to bring world-leading science and technology together around some of the globe’s biggest challenges and accelerate the path from discovery to real-world impact.

“Many new directions in science have been launched by new instruments: the telescope, the microscope, the sequencer. Foundation models of biology, simulations grounded in physics, and laboratories run by embodied AI are the next wave of tools. Building them takes AI researchers working alongside engineers and scientists, which is what EIT puts in one place. Our vision is an EIT where biologists design new molecules and organisms the way a programmer writes and executes code.” – Dr Danilo Jimenez Rezende

This appointment marks the start of a new chapter for AIR, with Danilo and Matej supported by EIT’s Board and senior leadership as they build on the strong foundations AIR has in place.

"The opportunity at EIT is to convert the exciting advances in AI and robotics to real world scientific outcomes. We have a multi-disciplinary team traversing world-leading scientists, frontier AI development, hardware design, automation experience and embodied AI. This will allow us to seamlessly convert diverse hypotheses of our scientists into experimental reality and establish closed-loop systems with our frontier AI tools.” – Dr. Matej Macek

Danilo has worked at the frontier of generative AI and its application to the natural sciences since 2012, more than a decade of it at Google DeepMind. He helped establish foundational methods in generative modelling and statistical inference, and has led research applying AI across the sciences, from nuclear physics to molecular systems, alongside work on AI agents. He is also Associate Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Oxford, in the Departments of Statistics and Engineering Science. He has a background in theoretical physics and computational neuroscience and holds a PhD from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.

Before joining EIT, Matej was a Partner at QuantumBlack, where he led multidisciplinary teams applying AI to complex problems across healthcare, life sciences and other industries, including work focused on accelerating R&D through AI. He is also Chief Technologist at Every Cure, where he works using AI to identify new uses for existing medicines for rare and underserved diseases. Matej holds a PhD in Neuroscience from University College London, where his research focused on neural information processing and machine learning.  

“AI and robotics will be fundamental to how science is done in the coming years. As an AI-native research institute, EIT brings AI, robotics and biology together under one roof to meet global challenges with greater urgency accelerating both discovery and translation into real-world impact. Danilo and Matej bring complementary strengths across frontier AI, technology and scientific application. The ambition is not simply to apply AI to the science we already do, but to open new possibilities for what our scientists are able to discover and build.” – Prof. Gil McVean on behalf of EIT Board

Professor Chris Holmes, who led AIR since its inception, will continue his engagement at EIT as Visiting Faculty and a member of the Scientific Management Committee. Chris played a central role in establishing AIR and building its scientific foundations, and will remain connected to EIT’s scientific community, continuing to contribute his expertise in AI, statistics and machine learning.