— Jordan Arnold is the new director of the Washington State Broadband Office within the Department of Commerce, effective Jan. 2.

Under the Biden administration, Arnold served as a senior policy advisor on the Infrastructure Implementation Team within the Office of the Chief of Staff. Her work focused on helping lead the $65 billion broadband portfolio, which included implementation of the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program and other initiatives.

“Jordan has a deep understanding of what it takes to help communities succeed in a digital world,” said Commerce Director Joe Nguyễn in statement. “Her background working at the highest policy levels in the Biden White House will help power Washington forward in our efforts to connect everyone to the internet.”

— Rebecca Lovell has taken the role of interim president and CEO of Greater Seattle Partners (GSP), a regional public-private economic development organization. She has served as chief operating officer of the group for nearly three years.

Lovell’s past roles include CEO of Denali Founder Consulting, executive director of Madrona Venture Group’s Create33, and Seattle’s interim director of Economic Development.

“Rebecca has been a key leader in our organization’s success, and we are delighted to see her at the helm of GSP. She energizes the community, the GSP team and our investors,” said Shane Jones, chair of GSP’s board of directors and a senior vice president at Alaska Airlines, in a statement.

Lovell is succeeding Brian Surratt, who took the presidency in 2022 and was recently appointed deputy mayor of the City of Seattle by Mayor-Elect Katie Wilson.

“We deeply appreciate Brian’s service, commitment and transformational leadership and are excited to see him in this strategic role with the City of Seattle,” Jones said.

Prior to Greater Seattle Partners, Surratt led a community development group, was VP at Alexandria Real Estate and spent 13 years with Seattle’s Economic Development agency, including as director.

— Jason Barnwell, a former Microsoft legal executive, is now chief legal officer for Agiloft, a California company providing software that helps businesses manage their contracts and legal agreements.

“Jason knows how to unlock the potential of legal teams, harness AI and data, and make contracting a true driver of business value,” said Agiloft CEO Eric Laughlin in a statement.

Barnwell was with the tech giant for more 15 years in a variety of legal roles. He left the position of general manager and associate general counsel for Monetization and Business Planning. Barnwell will remain in the Seattle area. On LinkedIn, he thanked his Microsoft colleagues for their support and leadership opportunities, noting that he remains “a cheerleader for Microsoft and its people.”

— Elena Winters has joined Brazil’s Elea Data Centers as vice president of international business. Seattle-based Winters was previously at Meta for more than eight years in infrastructure organization roles focused on data center and site selection. She will remain in Washington, leading Elea’s U.S. and international expansion strategy.

“Now, I’m stepping into a new challenge — gaining experience on the other side of the business, partnering closely with hyperscalers (not working for them!) to help accelerate the growth of AI infrastructure in LATAM,” Winters said on LinkedIn.

— Seattle startup Aarden AI named Michael Gleason as its staff data scientist. The company recently came out of stealth and offers an AI platform that helps landowners research and navigate deals with developers eager to build data centers, clean energy installations, housing and other uses. Gleason most recently worked as a geospatial data scientist at a national laboratory.

Editor’s note: Story updated to include interim CEO for Rebecca Lovell’s new title.

Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation are raising the alarm over the deadly impacts of international funding cuts in global health. Slashed budgets are projected to reverse decades of progress, causing the number of children dying before their fifth birthday to rise for the first time this century. An estimated 4.8 million children are expected to die this year, an increase of 200,000 deaths compared to last year.

“That is something that we hope never to report on, but it is a sad fact. And there are many causes, but clearly one of the key causes has been significant cuts in international development assistance from a number of high-income countries,” said Mark Suzman, CEO of the Gates Foundation, in a briefing with media this week.

Suzman specifically called out the U.S., the United Kingdom, France and Germany for “making significant cuts” to their support. Internationally, funding plunged 26.9% below last year’s levels, according to the philanthropy.

The Gates Foundation today released its annual Goalkeepers Report, which tracks progress on measures including poverty, hunger, access to clean water and energy, environmental benchmarks and other metrics.

The Seattle-based foundation worked with the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation to model the effects of reduced assistance. The researchers found that if the cuts to aid persist or worsen, an additional 12 million to 16 million children could die over the next 20 years.

While offering dire projections, the document aims to be a call to action for governments and philanthropists large and small.

“This report is a roadmap to progress,” Gates writes, “where smart spending meets innovation at scale.”

The billionaire Microsoft co-founder calls out some specific areas that could yield the most benefit, including primary healthcare, routine immunizations, the development of improved vaccines and new uses of data.

Modeling in the report predicts that by 2045, better vaccines for respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and pneumonia could save 3.4 million children, while new malaria tools could save an additional 5.7 million kids. Shots of lenacapavir could successfully prevent and treat HIV.

The foundation calls attention to the life-saving benefits of vaccinations as the U.S. Secretary of Health Robert F. Kennedy Jr. continues to undercut public support of vaccines.

With the backdrop of reduced federal funding for global humanitarian causes and backpedaling on vaccinations, Gates earlier this year announced plans to give away $200 billion — including nearly all of his wealth — over the next two decades through the Gates Foundation.

The Seattle-based organization, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this year, will sunset its operations on Dec. 31, 2045. The philanthropy is the world’s largest and has already disbursed $100 billion since its founding.

“If we do more with less now — and get back to a world where there’s more resources to devote to children’s health — then in 20 years, we’ll be able to tell a different kind of story,” Gates writes in the report. “The story of how we helped more kids survive childbirth, and childhood.”

David Baker’s lab at the University of Washington is announcing two major leaps in the field of AI-powered protein design. The first is a souped-up version of its existing RFdiffusion2 tool that can now design enzymes with performance nearly on par with those found in nature. The second is the release of a new, general-purpose version of its model, named RFdiffusion3, which the researchers are calling their most powerful and versatile protein engineering technology to date.

Last year, Baker received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his pioneering work in protein science, which includes a deep-learning model called RFdiffusion. The tool allows scientists to design novel proteins that have never existed. These machine-made proteins hold immense promise, from developing medicines for previously untreatable diseases to solving knotty environmental challenges.

Baker leads the UW’s Institute for Protein Design, which released the first version of the core technology in 2023, followed by RFdiffusion2 earlier this year. The second model was fine-tuned for creating enzymes — proteins that orchestrate the transformation of molecules and dramatically speed up chemical reactions.

The latest accomplishments are being shared today in publications in the leading scientific journals Nature and Nature Methods, as well as a preprint last month on bioRxiv.

A better model for enzyme construction

In the improved version of RFdiffusion2, the researchers took a more hands-off approach to guiding the technology, giving it a specific enzymatic task to perform but not specifying other features. Or as the team described it in a press release, the tool produces “blueprints for physical nanomachines that must obey the laws of chemistry and physics to function.”

“You basically let the model have all this space to explore and … you really allow it to search a really wide space and come up with great, great solutions,” said Seth Woodbury, a graduate student in Baker’s lab and author on both papers publishing today.

In addition to UW scientists, researchers from MIT and Switzerland’s ETH Zurich contributed to the work.

The new approach is remarkable for quickly generating higher-performing enzymes. In a test of the tool, it was able to solve 41 out of 41 difficult enzyme design challenges, compared to only 16 for the previous version.

“When we designed enzymes, they’re always an order of magnitude worse than native enzymes that evolution has taken billions of years to find,” said Rohith Krishna, a postdoctoral fellow and lead developer of RFdiffusion2. “This is one of the first times that we’re not one of the best enzymes ever, but we’re in the ballpark of native enzymes.”

The researchers successfully used the model to create proteins calls metallohydrolases, which accelerate difficult reactions using a precisely positioned metal ion and an activated water molecule. The engineered enzymes could have important applications, including the destruction of pollutants.

The promise of rapidly designed catalytic enzymes could unleash wide-ranging applications, Baker said.

“The first problem we really tackled with AI, it was largely therapeutics, making binders to drug targets,” he said. “But now with catalysis, it really opens up sustainability.”

The researchers are also working with the Gates Foundation to figure out lower-cost ways to build what are known as small molecule drugs, which interact with proteins and enzymes inside cells, often by blocking or enhancing their function to effect biological processes.

The most powerful model to date

While RFdiffusion2 is fine-tuned to make enzymes, the Institute for Protein Design researchers were also eager to build a tool with wide-ranging functionality. RFdiffusion3 is that new AI model. It can create proteins that interact with virtually every type of molecule found in cells, including the ability to bind DNA, other proteins and small molecules, in addition to enzyme-related functions.

“We really are excited about building more and more complex systems, so we didn’t want to have bespoke models for each application. We wanted to be able to combine everything into one foundational model,” said Krishna, a lead developer of RFdiffusion3.

Today the team is publicly releasing the code for the new machine learning tool.

“We’re really excited to see what everyone else builds on it,” Krishna said.

And while the steady stream of model upgrades, breakthroughs and publications in top-notch journals seems to continue unabated from the Institute for Protein Design, there are plenty of behind-the-scenes stumbles, Baker said.

“It all sounds beautiful and simple at the end when it’s done,” he said. “But along the way, there’s always the moments when it seems like it won’t work.”

But the researchers keep at it, and so far at least, they keep finding a path forward. And the institute continues minting new graduates and further training postdocs who go on to launch companies or establish their own academic labs.

“I don’t surf, but I sort of feel like we’re riding a wave and it’s just fun,” Baker said. “I mean, it’s so many, so many problems are getting solved. And yeah, it’s really exhilarating, honestly.”

The Nature paper, titled “Computational design of metallohydrolases,” was authored by Donghyo Kim, Seth Woodbury, Woody Ahern, Doug Tischer, Alex Kang, Emily Joyce, Asim Bera, Nikita Hanikel, Saman Salike, Rohith Krishna, Jason Yim, Samuel Pellock, Anna Lauko, Indrek Kalvet, Donald Hilvert and David Baker.

The Nature Methods paper, titled “Atom-level enzyme active site scaffolding using RFdiffusion2,” was authored by Woody Ahern, Jason Yim, Doug Tischer, Saman Salike, Seth Woodbury, Donghyo Kim, Indrek Kalvet, Yakov Kipnis, Brian Coventry, Han Raut Altae-Tran, Magnus Bauer, Regina Barzilay, Tommi Jaakkola, Rohith Krishna and David Baker.

Modern Hydrogen — a clean energy startup with technology that at one time seemed to delight Bill Gates and attracted his investment — has now laid off most of its employees and left contractors and vendors anxious about unpaid invoices.

The Seattle-area company has not publicly offered an explanation for the downsizing or said how many workers were impacted. In a recent email to business partners, officials referenced recent funding changes and said it was undergoing a “broader restructuring effort.”

Modern Hydrogen raised $125 million since launching a decade ago. It developed a device for cracking natural gas molecules, producing hydrogen as a climate friendly fuel and a material known as solid carbon that has a variety of industrial uses, including as a key ingredient in asphalt.

Gates explored that application during a visit to Modern Hydrogen last year. The Microsoft co-founder grabbed a wheelbarrow and shovel to fill a parking lot pothole with the carbon-trapping asphalt.

The layoffs hit as the company was preparing to finish its first commercial unit for a customer in Texas and had performed two successful pilot projects with utilities in Portland, Ore., and Miami.

In January, Modern Hydrogen announced a memorandum of understanding with Puget Sound Energy, a major Seattle-area utility, to collaborate in identifying industrial customers interested in the clean hydrogen technology. That was expected to include steel and cement makers and pulp-and-paper manufacturers that use processes requiring ultra-high temperatures that could be met by hydrogen.

Given that the company had seemingly solved the new technology’s technical hurdles and was building commercial momentum, employees and business partners were surprised by the layoffs.

“A lot of folks were rooting for us,” Michael Jung, Modern Hydrogen’s former government affairs and public policy lead, told GeekWire. “I think we would have solved some key problems in the energy transition.”

On Oct. 30, Amir Moftakhar, Modern Hydrogen’s chief financial officer, sent an email to some of its subcontractors and vendors disclosing the change of course.

“We wanted to inform you that, due to recent changes in our funding situation and a significant reduction in company operations, we must terminate our engagement with you effective 10/30/2025,” stated the email, which was shared with GeekWire by one of its recipients.

“This decision is part of a broader restructuring effort which is being developed and does not reflect on your work,” Moftakhar continued. “We want to sincerely thank you for the professionalism, dedication, and quality you’ve shown throughout our collaboration and for your understanding.”

It is unclear if the company is closing entirely, what will happen with the machinery and technology, and if some component of the effort will continue in a different form.

GeekWire reached out to Modern Hydrogen CEO Tony Pan for an official comment and will update the story if he responds. We contacted a Gates’ representative for a comment as well.

One subcontractor, who asked not to be named, said that until the email went out, “things were cooking along” in their collaboration with Modern Hydrogen. Now the company is anxious about if and when it will get paid for outstanding invoices that total tens of thousands of dollars.

Modern Hydrogen got its start in 2015 at Intellectual Ventures, an innovation hub created by former Microsoft researcher Nathan Myhrvold with backing from Gates. The startup, which was originally called Modern Electron, initially focused on devices that paired with home furnaces and hot water tanks to capture the appliances’ wasted heat and turn it into electricity.

In 2023 it pivoted to focus on hydrogen and changed its name. The company’s most recent round was $25 million raised a year ago. It had approximately 80 employees at the time, according to an analysis of LinkedIn data. Modern Hydrogen co-founder and former CTO Max Mankin left the company in January.

Gates has in the past been an enthusiastic supporter of hydrogen fuel. In June 2022, he posted a Gates Notes touting the so-called “Swiss Army knife” of clean energy given its versatile applications. He was a prominent investor in the company, whose other backers included NextEra Energy, one of the world’s largest utilities; Miura; National Grid Partners; IRONGREY; Starlight Ventures; Valo Ventures and Metaplanet.

Hydrogen saw a surge of interest during the Biden administration, which created hydrogen hubs around the U.S. to bolster the technology. That support has been curtailed under the Trump administration, which canceled funding for hubs in the Pacific Northwest and California, while the remaining five hubs appear to be at risk of losing support.

And on Oct. 28, Gates posted a memo on his personal blog that dampened his earlier excitement around climate efforts.

“Although climate change will have serious consequences — particularly for people in the poorest countries — it will not lead to humanity’s demise,” Gates wrote. “People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future.”

Editor’s note: Information added Dec. 4 to provide detail on the hydrogen hubs.

Seattle biotech startup Curi Bio, which enables the screening of new drugs using cells and 3D tissue models derived from human cells, announced $10 million in new funding.

Curi Bio’s customers include large biopharmaceutical and biotech companies such Novo Nordisk, Eli Lilly, Astrazeneca, Pfizer, Boehringer Ingelheim, UCB, Novartis and others. Its Series B round was led by Seoul-based DreamCIS, which supports biopharma R&D through extensive research services.

“We are thrilled to partner with DreamCIS, who shares our conviction that drug discovery urgently needs more human-relevant data at the preclinical stage,” said Michael Cho, Curi Bio’s chief strategy officer, in a statement. “The vast majority of new drugs fail in human clinical trials because preclinical animal and 2D cell models have failed to be good predictors of human outcomes.”

Curi Bio’s platform integrates bioengineered tissues created from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) with data collection and analysis. The additional funding will expedite its development of new platforms for cardiac, skeletal muscle, metabolic, smooth muscle and neuromuscular diseases, the company said.

The Seattle area is a hub of life science and biotech companies, including numerous efforts focused on AI-assisted research. Researchers have emphasized the need to test computer-generated drug candidates in the lab to verify their capabilities and impacts.

“Curi Bio’s unique integration of cells, systems, and data is a paradigm shift for preclinical drug discovery,” said Jeounghee Yoo, CEO of DreamCIS. “We were incredibly impressed by the company’s innovative platforms and their ability to generate functional data from 3D human tissues at scale.”

Curi Bio has raised $20 million from investors and $12 million from federal grants.

The company spun out of the University of Washington a decade ago as NanoSurface Biomedical. In April, Curi Bio celebrated the opening of its new 13,942-square-foot headquarters and research facility on the Seattle waterfront.

Nuclear power company TerraPower has passed the Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff’s final safety evaluation for a permit to build a reactor in Wyoming. The Washington-based company backed by Bill Gates and NVIDIA could be the first to deploy a utility-scale, next-generation reactor in America.

TerraPower’s Natrium design pairs a small modular reactor (SMR) with an integrated thermal battery. The SMR generates 345 megawatts of continuous electrical power. The thermal battery, which stores excess heat in molten salt, allows the system to surge its output to 500 megawatts for more than five hours, generating enough energy to power 400,000 homes at maximum capacity.

“Today is a momentous occasion for TerraPower, our project partners and the Natrium design,” said company CEO Chris Levesque in a statement issued Monday. The favorable assessment “reflects years of rigorous evaluation, thoughtful collaboration with the NRC, and an unwavering commitment to both safety and innovation.”

The company launched in 2006 and is building on technology used in an experimental breeder reactor in Idaho that operated for nearly 30 years before shutting down.

TerraPower set a goal of producing power at the Kemmerer, Wyo., site by 2030. The reactor is located near a retiring coal plant.

There is tremendous renewed interest in nuclear as tech giants and data center operators scramble for new energy sources to power AI operations. Microsoft, Amazon and others have invested in a combination of existing nuclear plants that can be restarted and construction of new facilities. The Trump administration has pledged to expedite permitting.

“We’ve finished our technical work on the Kemmerer review a month ahead of our already accelerated schedule, as we aim to make licensing decisions for new, advanced reactors in no more than 18 months,” said Jeremy Groom, acting director of the NRC’s Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation.

“We thank TerraPower for promptly addressing the agency’s questions to ensure safety and enable the NRC to efficiently process the application,” he added in a statement.

The NRC said there are no safety aspects that would preclude issuing a construction permit for the reactor. TerraPower last year broke ground in Wyoming on non-nuclear components of the facility.

In June the company announced $650 million in new funding from Gates, who helped start TerraPower, as well as the venture arm of chip giant NVIDIA. It previously raised more than $1 billion, including investments from Gates as well as South Korea-based SK Inc. and SK Innovation, according to PitchBook. TerraPower has additionally been awarded roughly $2 billion from the U.S. Department of Energy.

There are still additional permitting hurdles to complete:

• In the coming weeks, the NRC staff will provide a safety evaluation and final environmental impact statement to the Commission for the final phase of the licensing.
• The Commission then determines whether the staff’s review supports the findings required to issue the permit, and votes on whether to direct the staff to issue the permit.
• If the NRC issues the permit, TerraPower will need to submit an operating license application for approval.

In an unusual act of philanthropy, an anonymous donor has committed more than $50 million to the University of Washington to support the little-known field of medical laboratory science. The funds will be distributed over the next half-century.

UW leaders called the gift “transformational,” noting it’s the largest gift they’re aware of for this particular specialty.

The donation will immediately impact the current class of 35 students in the Medical Laboratory Science Undergraduate Program by covering their tuition costs — waiving about $9,000 per student — during the two quarters of clinical rotations in their senior year.

When the students learned the news at an event Monday at the UW’s Seattle campus, many began to cry.

Students who graduate with a four-year degree in medical laboratory sciences are essential, behind-the-scenes healthcare workers. They collect biological samples, process the material, help interpret the results, and provide necessary data for individual patients and public health institutions.

Dr. Geoff Baird, chair of the Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology at UW Medicine, praised the program for training these healthcare professionals.

“No one really ever pays attention to the glue that holds the whole thing together,” Baird said of their critical role.

Dr. Tim Dellit, UW Medicine CEO and the dean of the School of Medicine Tim Dellit, echoed the sentiment in sharing news of the gift with the students. “In many ways, you are the unsung heroes,” he said. “You work behind the scenes that allow all of the healthcare machinery to continue to work.”

The field, however, is facing a challenge. Despite its importance, the workforce is aging, and there aren’t enough students graduating with the needed expertise, said Baird. The new gift is designed to help address that shortage by expanding the two-year medical laboratory sciences program from the current 70 students to 100 over the next decade.

Graduates earn a four-year bachelor’s degree and professional certifications, ready for employment at clinics and hospitals.

The university didn’t share details about the donor, except to say that he is a Washington resident and a big fan of the longtime, local burger franchise, Dick’s Drive-In. To celebrate the news, he requested that the students were served burgers at the announcement.

For the students, the financial relief felt profound.

Senior Lily Koplowitz-Fleming was grateful that she won’t have to juggle an additional job on top of the nine-hours, five-days a week that’s required by the clinical rotation. Instead, she’ll be able to focus on the training for her future career, which she said is a meaningful blend of “skills-based and knowledge-based” work.

Another senior, Keila Uchimura, also said she enrolled in the program because she “really likes being able to see the direct impact you make.”

While medical lab scientists typically work in the background, their roles became more noticeable during the pandemic as people rushed to get tested and waited anxiously for results.

Baird praised the donor and his gift in an earlier GeekWire interview.

“The morality, the righteousness of it — it’s just really impressive that someone was able to find that generosity,” he said. “And we’re all in the state of Washington forever indebted — not just the students.”

— Expedia Group appointed Xavier Amatriain as its first chief artificial intelligence officer and data officer. He joins the Seattle-based travel giant from Google where he served as vice president of product in AI and Compute Enablement. Other past employers include Quora, LinkedIn and Netflix.

“[Amatriain’s] deep expertise in building large-scale AI platforms will help redefine how people experience travel,” Expedia CTO Ramana Thumu said in a statement. “Expedia Group operates at a scale few can match, and we invest deeply in our talent, giving technologists the space to learn, experiment, and push the boundaries of what AI can do.”

Amatriain, based in San Jose, Calif., has mapped a diverse career path — he’s been a university professor in Spain, a healthcare startup co-founder, a researcher, and an engineering leader.

— Textio co-founder and former CEO Kieran Snyder returned to Microsoft as vice president of AI transformation.

“My goal in this new role is to help Microsoft be the best living case study of effective, human AI transformation in the world,” Snyder said on LinkedIn.

Snyder began her tech career at Microsoft in 2004, working on the Bing search engine and Windows. In 2014, she launched Textio, which claims to be the first-to-market venture using AI for HR functions. The company’s software helps organizations recruit, hire and retain inclusive teams.

Over the past two years, Snyder ran a business called “nerd processor,” which offered research and leadership coaching, and served as chief scientist emeritus at Textio, where she is now on the board of directors.

— Ross Tennenbaum is leaving his role as president of Avalara for a new role with an unnamed public company, according to the Puget Sound Business Journal. Tennenbaum joined the tax software giant in 2019 and was previously CFO. He worked at Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse before joining Avalara, which relocated its headquarters from Seattle to North Carolina following its acquisition by Vista Equity Partners in 2022. It filed to go public, again, earlier this year.

— After more than 12 years at T-Mobile, Janice Kapner is leaving the telecommunications giant. Kapner was chief communications and corporate responsibility officer and executive VP at the Bellevue, Wash., company where she led a team of more than 160 employees.

“From Magenta sneakers and confetti cannons to competitive stunts, big bets, and a front-line team that made the brand burst off the page and into the world — these are moments I’ll never forget,” Kapner said on LinkedIn. “They shaped me as much as I helped shape them.”

Prior to T-Mobile, Kapner was at Microsoft for more than a decade.

— Former Microsoft and Amazon leader Vinita Ananth is now senior director of product for the cloud company Nebius. Ananth, based in the Seattle area, has been working since July on stealth-mode startups HelpViber and FulcrumAX. Ananth called the decision to leave these ventures “difficult and emotional.”

“I’m thrilled that my co-founder will continue driving both HelpViber and FulcrumAX forward, with a strategic focus on customer traction, platform maturity, and meaningful funding milestones over the coming year,” she said on LinkedIn, adding that she’ll continue in advisor and co-founder roles.

— PayPal appointed Bo English-Wiczling as VP of global developer relations. English-Wiczling, based in Seattle, joins from Oracle, where she worked for nearly nine years in leadership roles in database product management and developer relations. Previous employers include Amazon and Best Buy.

“After an incredible journey working alongside talented engineers, community leaders, and innovation-minded partners, this new role feels like the perfect next step,” English-Wiczling said on LinkedIn. “I’ll be working at the intersection of PayPal’s global payments platform and developer ecosystems — helping build, grow, and energize the communities and relationships that power our future.”

— Jaimin Gandhi joined Seattle-based AI roleplay startup Yoodli as a product leader. Gandhi’s past roles include leadership positions at Nerdy, Binance, Uber, DocuSign, Microsoft and others.

Over the past year, Gandhi built FourPoint.AI, a tool that helps job seekers improve their communications. While he won’t be adding new features to FourPoint, “I am opening it up for free,” Gandhi said on LinkedIn. “If it helps someone land their next opportunity the way it helped me find mine, that is a meaningful way to pay it forward.”

— Kapil Hetamsaria is now chief business officer of Neo4j, a data analysis, graph intelligence platform. Hetamsaria joins from C3 AI, where he served as a vice president, and was previously co-founder and CEO of Viddl App, a Bellevue-based short-video platform.

— Dave Rosenbaum is leaving his role as senior publications manager at Seattle-based pet sitting company Rover to join Airbnb.

“I have always been a firm believer in the transformative power of travel — discovering new places, trying new foods, and having new experiences,” Rosenbaum wrote on LinkedIn. “Airbnb’s mission is central to this belief that the world offers limitless possibilities.”

Rosenbaum is also a deputy mayor and city council member for Mercer Island, a city east of Seattle, and previously served in legislative roles for members of Congress.

— Ambika Singh, founder and CEO of online clothing rental company Armoire, joined the board of trustees for the Seattle Metro Chamber.

— Pete Fewing, associate athletic director at Seattle University and longtime Sounders FC broadcaster, joined the board of directors for Starfire Sports. The organization provides coding classes, drone summer camps, and other free, after-school sports programming for underprivileged kids in South Seattle.

The University of Washington is powering up its vision for a brighter, more sustainable future with a newly completed solar canopy installed in a sprawling parking lot north of Husky Stadium.

The 84-kilowatt solar array is paired with Level 2 EV charging that can accommodate 20 vehicles simultaneously. The $3.7 million project includes electrical infrastructure to support the future installation of panels capable of nearly 30 times more power generation — up to 2.5 megawatts. That’s enough capacity to power roughly 2,000 homes.

The solar canopy is a pilot project supporting the UW’s goals to cut its carbon footprint, said Mark Huppert, interim director of UW Transportation Services.

“Located on the site of the former Montlake landfill, the pilot demonstrates how the land can be put to work to achieve more sustainable outcomes,” Huppert said via email.

Project partners include Sea Con as the general contractor and Prime Electric as the electrical contractor. The canopy system was fabricated by Trinity Structures, which has since rebranded as Trinity Energy.

The installation is connected to electrical grids powering the City of Seattle and the UW’s campus. The ability to generate energy onsite can curb the university’s reliance on the utility grid while reducing the impacts of power outages and fluctuating electricity costs.

“Generating solar power from a parking lot may sound modest, but the strategic value is enormous,” said Darin Leonard, president of Trinity Energy, in a statement.

The idea for the project grew out of a collaboration between the student organization UW Solar; Anne Eskridge, the retired director of UW Transportation Services; and Jan Whittington, director of the UW’s Urban Infrastructure Lab.

The university is currently drafting its 2050 Sustainability Action Plan, which includes the long-term expansion of the parking lot solar canopies.

The UW Solar students “will continue to support the efforts to achieve the vision of a complete build-out,” Huppert said.

The project was funded by UW Transportation Services, Seattle City Light and Washington state’s Climate Commitment Act, administered through the Washington State Department of Commerce’s electric vehicle charging program.

Editor’s note: Story updated to provide additional information on project partners.

When Ambika Singh, the CEO and founder of the online clothing rental company Armoire, began exploring AI applications, she had to thread the needle between embracing cutting-edge tech and deploying it mindfully.

The Seattle startup has always been “a very human-powered business,” Singh said, with a strong sustainability mission to curb clothing waste through rentals. Consequently, employees were anxious about turning tasks over to bots and troubled by the environmental impacts of data centers and AI computing — despite its potential to remove tedium and boost the company’s finances.

In Armoire’s first big AI splash, the company recently launched a virtual stylist to support customers in their search for the perfect tops, pants, jackets and dresses.

The AI initiative is just the latest challenge Singh has navigated since founding Armoire nearly a decade ago. The company survived the pandemic, pivoting from professional attire to leisure wear during lockdowns, before returning to its roots as in-office mandates took effect. She has responded to an evolving customer base, louder calls for resort and après ski outfits, and demand for an in-person storefront for trying on clothes.

Now, the business is weathering the current economic uncertainties driven by layoffs, fluctuating tariffs and rising prices. But while these conditions could raise expenses for Armoire, they are expected to bolster its customer base as clothing rentals become a cost-saving strategy to maintain professional and personal wardrobes.

“Renting your closet is another way to maintain the lifestyle that you want under different budgetary constraints,” Singh said.

‘No chatbot energy here’

The new Armoire AI app helps customers quickly find curated recommendations in a sea of apparel. The assistant asserts itself quietly with a prompt woven into the display of blouses and pants, asking what it can help find. Once a user clicks on it, the tech suggests items to search for and also allows for user-generated questions.

The app takes a few seconds to cross-reference the customer’s preferences — based on past rentals and items she’s liked or voted down — with clothes currently in stock and ready to ship. The AI provides chipper dialogue and refines selections based on feedback.

In pitching the tech, the company said the AI “talks to you just like a real stylist would (no chatbot energy here) and helps you discover the best pieces for your style in seconds — no scrolling required.”

Shopping assistants fueled by generative AI are proving an increasingly popular trend for online retailers, including Amazon’s recent introduction of Rufus to dig up product recommendations. The chatty tech is also showing up on sites like Redfin and Zillow to aid in home searches.

Armoire is developing additional AI technologies, such as a tool to help standardize clothing descriptions across different brands. It might sound trivial, but companies can have significantly different definitions for sleeve length, for example, whether short, long, capped or three-quarter.

The startup has worked to distinguish itself from larger competitors by offering consultations with stylists via phone and email, and Singh said this human touch will remain a core feature. And the AI, of course, isn’t perfect. In our own test, the assistant landed on a solid blazer suggestion but went on to pair it with an absurdly frilly blouse that a human stylist would not have picked.

And some components of the business simply can’t be automated. Armoire has a brick-and-mortar space south of Seattle’s downtown for trying on clothes. It regularly hosts in-person events for networking and fashion shows, including a collection of up-cycled athletic wear from former pro-soccer player Lu Barnes and an annual South Asian fashion event.

Trending upward

Armoire’s multi-faceted approach to clothing rentals and connecting to customers has found success, albeit with some snags along the way.

The startup has raised $12 million from investors, including a $3.5 million round in 2021 that included backing from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani and others. Armoire reached break-even this quarter, a first for the business.

While the pandemic shrank Armoire’s payroll from more than 60 workers down to 25, it has since rebounded to 100 employees. Last April, the company won Workplace of the Year at the annual GeekWire Awards.

The online clothing rental market is worth an estimated $2.6 billion worldwide, according to October data from Future Market Insights Inc., and it’s expected to grow to $6.4 billion over the decade, with China, India and the U.S. leading the expansion. The sector could benefit as cash-strapped customers look to rentals and secondhand.

“Services that can offer consumers the opportunity to keep their wardrobes fresh on an ongoing basis are really benefiting,” Sky Canaves, an analyst at market research firm eMarketer, said in a recent NPR story about online rentals.

Armoire remains a smaller operation than competitors such as Rent-the-Runway and Nuuly, which is part of a conglomerate including Urban Outfitters, Anthropologie and Free People. Her customer base is thousands, Singh said, but not hundreds of thousands.

The success of the bigger outlets are useful as they demonstrate that the model works, she said. “Rental continues to grow and so we’re benefiting from that.”

Verizon is laying off approximately 165 employees in Washington state, including analysts, engineers and retail workers.

The layoffs were disclosed in a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) filed with the state’s Employment Security Department. The jobs are slated to end Jan. 23.

“Verizon is consolidating and restructuring its operations to maximize the utilization of company facilities and resources,” Eboni Gregoire, Verizon’s director of HR operations, said in a WARN letter.

Earlier this month, The Wall Street Journal reported that New York-based Verizon was planning to cut 15,000 workers, primarily through layoffs. That includes shifting about 200 of its stores into franchised outlets, which removes employees from the telecom’s payroll.

The WARN letter states that five facilities — in Redmond, Renton, Woodinville, Spokane and Bellingham are “being divested to an agent” and will no longer be operated by Verizon. It was unclear if the sites would close or become a franchise.

Approximately 22 of the workers being laid off are based at a corporate office in Bellevue, Wash., that Verizon took over from rival T-Mobile last year. T-Mobile, headquartered in Bellevue, sublet 32,682 square feet of space to Verizon at 90 North, a building located at 3255 160th Ave. SE., the Puget Sound Business Journal previously reported.

The layoffs come as Verizon lost 7,000 phone subscribers in the most recent quarter, while AT&T and T-Mobile have been adding customers, WSJ reported. On Thursday, T-Mobile announced a “Switching Made Easy” initiative launching next month to help Verizon and AT&T customers switch to T-Mobile in as little as 15 minutes.

Editor’s note: The number of workers impacted by the layoffs was off by three in the original story and was corrected Nov. 25.

— Andrea Chartock is now the head of Washington’s Office of Economic Development and Competitiveness, a division of the state Department of Commerce.

Chartock spent more than 21 years with international development company DAI, working on United States Agency for International Development (USAID) initiatives in countries including Liberia and Moldova. Her most recent efforts focused on economic growth in Ukraine before USAID was defunded this year.

Commerce Director Joe Nguyễn said that Chartock “has the experience and dedication needed to elevate our existing business community and foster growth in innovative ways.”

The department earlier this year scaled back a key economic development program amid the state budget crunch. The department currently manages more than $8 billion across 485 programs, Nguyễn said in April.

— Julie Brill, Microsoft’s former chief privacy officer, has joined the board of directors of the enterprise software company Ethyca.

“Ethyca’s approach puts privacy, security, and policy at the heart of enterprise data infrastructure. I’m excited to help guide the company as it works with global organizations to scale AI responsibly,” Brill said in a statement.

Brill left Microsoft in July after more than eight years. Her title included corporate vice president for Global Privacy, Safety, and Regulatory Affairs. Brill is also serving as an expert in residence at Harvard University. She previously shared plans to open a consultancy this fall.

— Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella named Rolf Harms, a corporate vice president at the tech giant, as an advisor on AI economics to work with the company’s top leaders. Business Insider obtained a November memo from Nadella to Microsoft executives announcing Harms’ expanded role.

Harms has been with Microsoft for nearly two decades and penned a foundational whitepaper in 2010 addressing the economics of cloud computing.

“We need to rapidly rethink the new economics of AI across the company — just as we once did with the cloud,” Nadella wrote, according to BI. “This platform shift is all about building a new AI factory and family of Copilots and agents that drive diffusion and usage across the full stack.”

— Seattle Reign FC and Seattle Sounders FC announced Sean Coury as chief financial officer. Coury joins the soccer clubs from Bezos Academy, where he served as CFO of the educational nonprofit launched by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. He previously worked in financial roles at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Apptio, where he helped the Bellevue, Wash., company go public.

The Reign and the Sounders last month hired Ro Vega as chief marketing officer.

— Francois Ajenstat is leaving his position as chief product officer at the software company Amplitude. Ajenstat was previously CPO at Seattle’s Tableau Software, where he spent 13 years, followed by a brief run at Salesforce that ended in 2023. Earlier in his career, Ajenstat was with Microsoft for a decade, holding titles including technical evangelist, product manager and senor director of environmental sustainability.

— The University of Washington’s Institute for Protein Design (IPD) has multiple leadership changes.

UW biochemistry professor Neil King is now IPD’s deputy director as Lance Stewart, former interim executive director, retires from the organization. King was previously an associate professor at IPD, and Nobel Laureate David Baker will stay in his role as director.

“When I joined the IPD in 2013, it was clear that helping to build the IPD would be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to contribute and observe firsthand the development of a whole new industry based on computationally designed proteins,” Stewart said on LinkedIn.

The IPD made three additional hires:

• Jenny Cronin is now director of translational research, joining IPD from AI2 Incubator, a Seattle-based startup organization. Cronin is also a venture partner with Pack Ventures, a fund that backs startups with UW connections.
• Roseanne Hampton Reich is assistant director of administration. Her past roles include positions at lululemon, UW’s Division of Nephrology, Seattle Children’s and others.
• Justin English is director of strategic development, previously working as an assistant professor at the University of Utah. English holds a PhD in pharmacology. 

— Alex Pettit is returning to Oregon to serve as the state’s digital transformation projects director. Pettit has previously held top technology roles for Oregon, Texas and Oklahoma, and was most recently Colorado’s chief technology officer for nearly six years.

“This next chapter allows me to bring hard-won experience from the field and apply it to familiar soil. I’m honored to once again contribute to Oregon’s technology future — helping modernize legacy platforms, evolve our enterprise architecture, and prepare for the demands ahead,” he wrote on LinkedIn.

— Brian Bishop is CEO of Portland, Ore.-based Skip Technology, a startup building long-duration, grid-scale batteries. Bishop takes over for Brennan Gantner, who co-founded the hydrogen bromine battery company seven years ago.

Bishop has more than 30 years of engineering, manufacturing and management experience in a variety of electronics-focused businesses. He was previously with Salt Creek Capital, which acquires and recapitalizes small companies.

— Kelly Goetsch has taken a new title at e-commerce logistics startup Pipe17, moving from chief operating officer to president. The Seattle startup announced a $17.5 million Series A round earlier this year.

Goetsch has also helped lead the creation of the first open standard to unify how commerce systems communicate, including AI-powered selling channels and payments, logistics and fulfillment. The effort was overseen by the nonprofit Commerce Operations Foundation, which released the initial standard this week.

— Tom Mara, executive director of SIFF, has left the nonprofit following the decision not to renew his contract, the Seattle Times reported. Mara previously ran the popular Seattle radio station KEXP, then joined SIFF in 2022.

The following year Mara announced the organization’s purchase of the historic Cinerama, a movie theater previously owned by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen that ceased operations during the pandemic. The acquisition was celebrated by many, but the venue has struggled financially.

University of Washington President Robert Jones wants to expand computer science access for undergraduates and build new public-private partnerships to tackle society’s grand challenges — and he has concrete ideas on how to make that happen.

More than 100 days into his tenure as the UW’s 34th president, Jones is also working to dispel two persistent myths: that it’s nearly impossible to get into the UW’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, and that AI is taking everyone’s jobs.

This fall, the Allen School — a top tech program nationally — accepted 37% of the direct applicants from Washington state high schools, though out-of-state admissions is only 4%. “We actually accept many more students than the general public believes,” Jones said in an interview this week with GeekWire.

As to the AI job apocalypse? “That’s an overblown fear,” Jones said. AI is a “critically important tool to have in your tool chest to be more effective in the future.”

Drawing on his experience leading the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Jones wants to give a bigger slice of the UW’s 45,000 undergraduates access to computer science courses — even if they’re in unrelated degree programs.

The idea is modeled on the groundbreaking “CS + X” initiative that he helped expand during his past presidency in Illinois. The program created tech-infused studies in 17 degree programs including advertising, astronomy, economics, music, philosophy and physics.

In Illinois, CS + X launched in crop sciences more than a decade ago because agricultural tech was, and continues to be, one of the fastest growing sectors in the state. Jones himself began his career as a professor in plant physiology and became an international authority in the field.

“AI is just an amazing tool, and we’re doing work here to try to make sure that our students are getting as comprehensive an education as possible,” Jones said. Bolstering a graduate’s knowledge of computer science and artificial intelligence in addition to their focus area makes them “much more employable.”

A $10 million gift announced Tuesday from Microsoft pioneer Charles Simonyi and his wife, Lisa Simonyi, will help facilitate the integration of AI into education and research across the university through the newly formed AI@UW initiative.

AI@UW, which includes a new Vice Provost for Artificial Intelligence position, will help the UW maintain its “strategic advantage” as an AI leader, Jones said. It’s also an example of the sort of public-private collaborations he’d like to foster.

“Radical partnerships”

Jones envisions expanding what he calls “radical partnerships” — building diverse coalitions across geographies, institutions and sectors to tackle problems “that are too big for any one entity to solve alone.”

The collaborations can bring together both expertise and funding. The university faces a difficult financial landscape as Washington state’s revenue forecast continues to weaken, drawing down an already strained budget. Add to that ongoing worries about funding cuts to federal research programs that the UW heavily relies upon.

Jones pointed to the university’s long-running WWAMI program, which serves medical students from Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana and Idaho who earn their degrees at the UW and return to their communities to practice medicine, as a prime example of the radical partnership approach.

“I’ve done about three or four of these over the last 10 years,” he said, “and they’re just amazing ways to bring people together and to think about doing research in a different, in a much more collaborative, much more impactful way than we’ve ever thought about.”

The strategy is particularly suited to AI, quantum computing or other massive technological challenges, he said. Jones was involved in partnerships with the University of Chicago to bolster quantum science research in Illinois and a human biology collaboration with the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Chicago.

In future collaborations in his new role, Jones is eager to work “seamlessly” with the region’s tech sector, leveraging the fact that the UW helped create an ecosystem that includes giants like Amazon and Microsoft, as well as hundreds of smaller companies.

“Given Dr. Jones’s work creating the quantum park in Chicago, I have no doubt that we will continue to see the UW play an integral role in the growth of the ecosystem,” said Laura Ruderman, CEO of the TechAlliance, who also called the UW “critical” to the state’s innovation economy.

More than 110 UW spinoffs currently operate in the state, according to the university’s CoMotion program, which supports entrepreneurship.

“What we have to do more of is working together to fund and to create the next big idea that’s going to be transformative,” Jones said, “not only for the state of Washington, but for the nation and the world.”

Battelle Memorial Institute, the government contractor operating Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), is laying off 68 workers based primarily in Washington state.

The layoffs were disclosed in a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) filed with the state’s Employment Security Department. The jobs are slated to end between Nov. 18 and Dec. 1.

In the WARN letter, Battelle stated that “due to unforeseen business circumstances” the company was not able to provide 60-days notices to impacted workers.

“As a result of funding uncertainties and evolving federal mission priorities, Battelle made great effort to avoid layoffs by reassigning work, reducing work hours and retaining staff on furlough status in the hope that additional funding would be realized,” the letter explained. “However, Battelle determined it is necessary to restructure our workforce and reduce staff in both research and operations.”

Forty-two of the roles are based at PNNL’s main campus in Richland, Wash.; three are located in Seattle; three in Oregon; and 20 are remote.

PNNL is a 60-year-old institution managed by the U.S. Department of Energy and last year employed roughly 6,400 people. The labs perform basic research in areas including energy, chemistry, data analytics and other science and technology fields.

“Battelle and PNNL are grateful for the contributions of each impacted employee and remain committed to delivering on vital missions in science, energy, and national security,” said PNNL spokesperson Dawn Zimmerman, via email.

Battelle told workers this summer that job reductions were coming given uncertainty in the federal budget, the Tri-City Herald reported. In September the company laid off an undisclosed number of PNNL employees and it has reduced medical benefits for retires, according to the Herald.

U.S. Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., reported in February that “a handful” of PNNL employees were let go in the Trump administration’s initial wave of government layoffs. The cuts were driven by efforts including the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which was previously led by Elon Musk, and executive orders eliminating work associated with climate change and diversity, equity and inclusion.

According to the WARN filing, affected workers in the latest cuts held titles including national security specialist; software, mechanical, nuclear or systems engineer; cyber security researcher; data scientist; project manager; administrative coordinator and other roles.

Editor’s note: This series profiles six of the Seattle region’s “Uncommon Thinkers”: inventors, scientists, technologists and entrepreneurs transforming industries and driving positive change in the world. They will be recognized Dec. 11 at the GeekWire Gala. Uncommon Thinkers is presented in partnership with Greater Seattle Partners.

After earning his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering, Brian Pinkard spent six months “flipping rocks,” as he describes it, in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains.

The rock-flipping was purposeful work: Pinkard was clearing obstructions and building trails for AmeriCorps, spending every night in a tent.

“I loved it. It was great. And the reason I did that is because I wanted to do something that mattered, that made a difference in the world,” he said. When the program ended, he was inspired to direct his impact to a larger environmental challenge.

His passion to do good, paired with an engineer’s drive for problem solving, led him to a doctoral degree from the University of Washington and then to launching Aquagga, a startup that’s destroying PFAS — a toxic class of pollutants known as “forever chemicals.”

“Brian has been very laser focused on his mission,” said Igor Novosselov, Pinkard’s PhD advisor and research professor at the UW’s Department of Mechanical Engineering. “He’s not a typical scientist who would just go and write a bunch of papers. He’s going after impact where it matters.”

But a few steps before PFAS, Pinkard was focused on nerve gas in the Middle East.

‘Nobody knows how to treat this stuff‘

When Pinkard joined Novosselov’s lab, it had U.S. Department of Defense funding to develop an in-the-field, mobile strategy for treating barrels of abandoned chemical weapons in the Syrian desert. The previous solution was to truck the barrels to the Mediterranean Sea, load them on a boat and incinerate the material.

“If you’re the guy who’s got to transport a nerve agent,” Pinkard noted, “it’s not a very good job.”

Within five years, the lab came up with a workable solution, but the need was no longer urgent and DoD shelved its application of the technology, though Novosselov continued to work on it.

Pinkard appreciated the tremendous power of the strategy for treating dangerous materials and wondered if there was another use case. Then as he was preparing to finish his PhD in June 2020, the COVID pandemic hit, derailing his plans to apply for a university postdoctoral fellowship as no one was hiring.

So he made a pivot to entrepreneurship — a role he had never considered.

Pinkard teamed up with engineer and tech innovator Nigel Sharp to explore the potential for using the tech, called supercritical water oxidation, to treat sewage sludge from wastewater treatment plants, but they realized the market wasn’t viable.

There was, however, buzz about PFAS.

“Everybody was talking about PFAS,” he said, and if anyone could figure out how to destroy the chemicals, it would be a breakthrough. That realization became his lightbulb moment.

Destroying PFAS

PFAS is a family of chemicals that for decades have been added to firefighting foams, food packaging, carpets and fabrics, water-repellent clothing and non-stick pans. The resilient chemicals are great at deflecting water, stains and grease — but they escape from products and now contaminate drinking water across the nation and are even in mothers’ breast milk.

PFAS are still in use, while researchers and regulators are increasingly concerned by their serious health impacts.

Pinkard and Sharp launched Aquagga in 2019 in Tacoma, Wash., and were soon joined by co-founder Chris Woodruff. The team kept the idea of modular treatment units but shifted to a related but different chemistry (hydrothermal alkaline treatment) for destroying PFAS, securing a patent for the approach from the Colorado School of Mines.

“Brian has been a great partner from the beginning,” said Timothy Strathmann, a Colorado School of Mines professor. “Unlike many entrepreneurs I’ve interacted with, he is also deeply interested in understanding the limitations and technical challenges associated with the technology. He’s keenly aware that the long-term success of Aquagga will only be achieved by addressing the critical barriers to deployment.”

Aquagga’s devices annihilates PFAS under super hot, high pressure conditions made caustic and corrosive through the addition of lye.

The company has done nine field demonstrations of its technology, including a project at an airport in Alaska, a DoD-funded project in North Carolina involving firefighting foams, and a wastewater demo with the City of Tacoma. It’s now close to signing its first long-term commercial deployment, Pinkard said, “which will be a huge milestone for us.”

“It’s really cool to see how much PFAS we’ve destroyed … even in our short journey,” Pinkard said. “And to think about where it could go, what it could enable at scale. So [I’m] very optimistic about Aquagga’s future. I’m very optimistic about the impact we could create, the lives we could save.”

The University of Washington today announced a $10 million gift from Microsoft pioneer Charles Simonyi and his wife, Lisa Simonyi, to launch AI@UW, a campus-wide initiative supporting the university’s leadership in the responsible, effective use of artificial intelligence in the classroom and research.

The initiative creates a new Vice Provost for Artificial Intelligence position, with Professor Noah Smith of the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering serving in the inaugural role.

Smith said there’s a huge amount of expertise around smart AI adoption at the UW, “and what I really want to do is connect all of that, bring it together, map out what people already know and are doing, cast the light on it so we can all learn from each other more effectively and accelerate it.”

Professors are eager — perhaps even desperate — for support navigating AI’s role in education.

“If you ask faculty what’s the one question on their minds right now, it’s: ‘My students are using AI. What now? What am I supposed to do? How do we respond to this?'” Smith said.

The UW’s response is setting a path where AI assists students by answering questions or prepping study tools, but doesn’t do the work for them. On the faculty side, it can aid in creating fair and useful tests and evaluations. Smith is advocating for conversations and transparency in helping students find the balance where AI complements their academic journey, but doesn’t replace their education.

“You don’t go to university,” he said, “if you don’t actually want to learn.”

A key component of AI@UW is its grant program — SEED-AI, which stands for Supporting Educational Excellence and Discovery. The grants will provide funding to faculty across the university who have innovative, exploratory approaches for using AI in their courses that could be widely adopted. The call for grant proposals should go out in the next few weeks.

Smith highlighted three additional focus areas:

• Governance and policy: Creating a governance committee that establishes infrastructure for setting AI use policies that facilitate innovation in the classroom.
• AI literacy courses: Developing courses for all undergraduates addressing AI literacy from different disciplinary perspectives so students “have an understanding of AI that is not grounded in fear or grounded in fantasy and hype,” Smith said.
• Expert network: Forming a network of AI experts within the UW who can assist faculty working on research and education projects and need a customized AI tool.

UW President Robert Jones said the initiative and new vice provost role will help the university maintain its “strategic advantage” as a leader in AI.

“We need somebody that wakes up each and every day that thinks about AI across the three parts of our mission: our teaching, our research and our innovation agenda,” Jones said in a GeekWire interview. “So that’s the value proposition.”

Including the donation announced today, Charles and Lisa Simonyi have given more than $27.5 million to the UW since 2009, supporting DIRAC (Data Intensive Research in Astrophysics & Cosmology), the Ana Mari Cauce Welcome Center and the Allen School building.

Charles Simonyi, who has a net worth north of $8 billion, was a groundbreaking software architect at Microsoft and remains a technical fellow with the Redmond, Wash.-based company, while Lisa Simonyi is chair of the UW Foundation Board.

The new gift also establishes the Charles and Lisa Simonyi Endowed Chair for Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technologies, with Smith selected as the inaugural recipient.

And in addition to his role at the Allen School, Smith is also affiliated with the Department of Linguistics, the Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences, the eScience Institute, and the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies, providing useful experience in working across disciplines.

Smith is reaching out to other institutions who are likewise pioneering programs to employ AI on campus to learn about their efforts, but added that the UW has an advantage with the new funding. “The Simonyi gift,” he said, “is going to set us ahead.”

Zap Energy shared news that its fusion device has generated a pressure that’s roughly 10,000 times the atmospheric pressure at sea level, or 10 times the pressure at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean’s Mariana Trench.

“This is a proof of principle that was designed to hit a particular set of milestones and to validate the principle, and it did that with flying colors,” said Ben Levitt, Zap’s head of R&D.

The Everett, Wash., company is in a race to efficiently smash together light atoms, simulating the reactions that fuel the sun. To do that on Earth, physicists need to create super hot temperatures and incredibly dense conditions and sustain that long enough for fusion to take place, releasing energy that can be captured and put on the grid.

Zap also shared that next month it will commission its fifth fusion device to continue testing and optimizing the different systems required by the technology. The new machine will be called FuZE-A.

The company is still operating two other machines, the FuZE-Q and FuZE-3, which is the device that hit the new pressure milestone.

“We can design and build one in half a year,” Levitt said of the fusion machines. “And that’s what our superpower is — this rapid iteration that we have at our fingertips.”

Different paths to fusion

Dozens of companies globally are trying to unlock fusion energy, which has eluded humanity for decades. But physicists are closer than ever to seizing the so-called Holy Grail of clean power, which is in great demand from tech companies running data centers and AI computations, as well as electrified transportation, industrial processes and building cooling and heating.

Physicists are chasing fusion with different kinds of reactors in various configurations using high-powered magnets and lasers to create and hold plasmas, which are super heated gases needed for fusion. Zap’s solution is to run a high current through the plasma in its reactor, which produces a magnetic field called a Z-pinch that contains and compresses the matter.

Helion Energy, a competitor located a short drive from Zap, is taking a different scientific strategy for fusion. It’s building larger fusion generators and has broken ground on a commercial facility in Eastern Washington that is supposed to begin operating in 2028, but essential technical hurdles still must be overcome.

Helion has been largely secretive in its efforts, citing concerns about thefts of intellectual property, while Zap has emphasized a more transparent approach to sharing its science and progress.

Data and progress

Zap will present data on its new 1.6 gigapascal pressure milestone at the American Physical Society Division of Plasma Physics meeting held this week in Long Beach, Calif., and later submit the research to a peer-reviewed journal.

“We’re going to share it in front of the entire fusion science community and in gory detail,” Levitt said. “So it’s not hot air, it’s hot plasma.”

Zap will also disclose details to the U.S. Department of Energy, which in 2023 selected the company to participate in the Milestone-Based Fusion Development Program. The company has also raised $330 million from investors and is No. 12 on the GeekWire 200, which ranks the Pacific Northwest’s top startups.

The recent milestone was achieved by splitting one of the two electrodes in the fusion generator that provide the energy needed to create and contain the plasma. The third electrode gave the device a new, metaphorical “knob” to turn, allowing the machine to crank up compression of the plasma.

The pressure achieved was 10-fold higher than previous efforts and tracks with the largely exponential gains that new iterations of the technology have produced at Zap.

But orders of magnitude of additional improvement are needed to reach the state where the system produces enough energy to feed the electrical grid.

Levitt said it’s hard to say when that could happen as the gains in the system aren’t linear but arrive in punctuated leaps forward. He hinted that scientific breakeven — getting more energy out of the fusion reaction than went into it, but not enough for power production — is possible by the end of the decade.

The new milestone is “great progress” but the work isn’t done, he said. “We’re not waving our flag and resting on our laurels.”

Below: A Zap video from a high-speed camera that captures a flash of plasma formed inside the FuZE-3 device. The camera is pointed straight toward the column of fusion plasma and the compression wave is visible as it collapses inward.

Auger, a startup building logistics and supply chain software, announced Yuqing Sun as its chief data and AI enablement officer. Sun joins the Bellevue, Wash.-based company from Johnson & Johnson where she has worked for nearly 20 years in a variety of supply chain, analytics and data science roles.

“Yuqing brings the rare combo of deep technical chops, operational scar tissue, and the calm that only comes from having seen every kind of supply-chain fire drill,” said Dave Clark, Auger’s founder and CEO and a former Amazon executive.

Clark noted on LinkedIn that while at Johnson & Johnson, Sun worked to modernize “one of the most complex supply chains on the planet through data and AI innovations. She built and scaled more than 30 AI-driven products across optimization, simulation, IoT, machine learning, computer vision — you name it.”

Last month Auger appointed Justine Hastings as chief AI economist. The company, ranked No. 48 on the GeekWire 200 list of top Pacific Northwest startups, raised a $100 million Series A round last December.

— Amy Harris is the new public policy and government relations director for the Washington Technology Industry Association (WTIA).

For the past nine years, Harris has been a principal for Red Strategies, which bills itself as providing “fundraising consulting and event planning for right of center candidates and organizations.” She has also worked as an executive assistant for two members of Congress.

Randa Minkarah, CEO of the WTIA consortium, praised Harris’ “deep experience in bipartisan coalition-building, strategic advocacy, and navigating complex political landscapes,” noting the skills will be instrumental in working in Washington state and the nation’s capitol.

— Marc Brown, a former corporate vice president at Microsoft who helped lead the acquisition of companies including LinkedIn, GitHub and Minecraft, has joined the board of directors for Syncro, a software platform for IT professionals.

Seattle-based Brown was with Microsoft for more than two decades, managing more than 185 acquisitions and 80 equity investments.

— Pyramid Communications, a longtime Seattle-area public relations firm, named Emily Ryan as its first CEO. Ryan was with Pyramid for nearly 14 years before taking a year-long role as chief communications officer for Our Children’s Trust in 2024.

“During a tumultuous period in the world, Pyramid is doubling down on our commitment to support changemakers leading bold action for a better world,” the company posted on LinkedIn. “Emily’s trusted, creative leadership will sustain our team and our clients as we continue to work alongside all of you…”

— Carbon Direct, a carbon management firm based in New York and Seattle, announced two leadership hires as a result of its recent acquisition of climate tech startup Pachama.

• Greg FitzGerald, based in Vancouver, B.C., is now vice president of supply and will help source and commercialize carbon credits that organizations purchase to offset their emissions.
• Diego Saez Gil, co-founder and former CEO of Pachama, has taken the role of senior vice president of strategic engagement and is based in the Bay Area.

The Allen Institute in Seattle has released the Brain Knowledge Platform, a research aid described as the most comprehensive artificial intelligence tool available for neuroscience.

The project aims to unify brain information from dozens of collaborators, species (such as humans, other primates and mice), and samples that span early development to old age, encompassing diverse data including cell types and disease indicators.

Using AI, this data has been translated into a shared scientific language or format, allowing for “apples-to-apples” comparisons across institutions and organisms to create a much larger dataset for new insights.

“Understanding the brain is not a single institute’s effort,” said Shoaib Mufti, the Allen Institute’s head of data and technology. “So you have to bring the community together in order to understand it.”

There’s an urgent need to better prevent, diagnose and treat neurological conditions. The number of people worldwide living with or dying from conditions like stroke, Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias, and meningitis has increased significantly over recent decades, according to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.

In 2021, an estimated 3.4 billion people experienced a nervous system condition, which also includes brain injuries and migraines.

To create the Brain Knowledge Platform, the Allen Institute recruited participants to voluntarily share their data. Contributors include the Allen Institute for Brain Science, the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research, teams at the University of Washington and Harvard University, the Seattle Alzheimer’s Disease Brain Cell Atlas, or SEA-AD, and others.

Amazon Web Services engineered the tool’s core computing infrastructure while Google developed AI models for the neuroscience. Funding came from the Allen Institute as well as the National Institutes of Health’s Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies Initiative, or BRAIN Initiative.

Mufti said the resource is designed to be a “discovery platform,” not a traditional research tool where a scientist has a clear idea of what they are looking for. “How you can get to the ‘aha moments’ so you find something unexpected?” he asked.

Using the platform, scientists will be able to look across diseases. Studying the differences and similarities between people diagnosed with Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s, for example, was previously laborious to make the data comparable.

With the Brain Knowledge Platform, “you can literally line those up side by side in the tool,” said Tyler Mollenkopf, associate director of data and technology at the Allen Institute.

While much of the data comes from research animals, information gathered from human brains — including 84 postmortem donors — is also available, stripped from identifying details.

The resource is offered to scientists for free. The team hopes more organizations contribute data and they’re devising a mechanism to provide attribution to credit researchers for their information, which could encourage sharing.

Given the massive societal impact of brain diseases “a real breakthrough is needed” to better understand them, said Mufti. “Let’s bring all the information together and make it discoverable. I’m hoping that [we] can really move the ball forward in a single community.”

Real estate brokerage platform Redfin released a conversational chatbot to help house hunters search for homes using natural language.

The tool lets users describe what they want and refine results through back-and-forth dialogue. Unlike real estate platforms that offer only one-off natural-language queries, Redfin says its chatbot can ask clarifying questions, respond to feedback, and surface more tailored recommendations.

“We relied on search filters to define queries for years, but people share more about their preferences when it’s a conversation,” Ariel Dos Santos, Redfin senior vice president of product and design, said in a statement.

Seattle-based Redfin, acquired by Rocket Companies in July, built the system with Sierra, the AI customer experience platform recently valued at $10 billion.

Redfin and other real estate companies are racing to deploy conversational AI tools. Last month, fellow Seattle real estate giant Zillow unveiled the first real estate app within ChatGPT.

Redfin’s new conversational interface aims to mirror how buyers talk to a real agent — but with the advantage of scanning every listing on Redfin nationwide. Home shoppers can tell the chatbot what they’re looking for, react to suggested listings (“more like this, but with an extra bedroom”), or adjust search criteria as new ideas arise. The feature also supports multiple languages.

As buyers interact with the chatbot, it “learns from real user conversations” to deliver increasingly relevant options over time, according to the company.

Early testing suggests that the feature is well-received. Users of the conversational search technology viewed nearly twice as many homes as those using filtered searches. They were also 47% more inclined to ask for a tour or other Redfin services, the company reported.

The tool is available on Redfin.com and mobile web, and will come to Redfin’s iOS app in December.

Last year the company launched its “Ask Redfin” generative AI assistant designed for homebuyer questions about a specific listing.