British artificial intelligence (AI) company BenevolentAI is expanding into the US, opening an office in New York.
Ken Mulvany, founder and chairman of BenevolentAI, said: “The opening of a New York office demonstrates our commitment to expanding as a global company and underlines the importance of having a footprint in the US with the access to talent, innovation, and commercial opportunities that being connected to one of the world’s centres of technology provides.”
Heading up the new office are two new-hires, Google’s Keith Hall and Daniel Neil from the Institute of Neuroinformatics, who join as principal natural language researcher and lead machine learning researcher respectively.
Hall has spent 19 years working on natural language understanding and was formerly a research scientist at Google where he worked on structured and unstructured models of natural language to improve contextual speech recognition.
Neil received his PhD from the Institute of Neuroinformatics at ETH in Zurich, Switzerland, where he focussed on co-developing deep learning algorithms and novel hardware to improve machine learning, using inspiration from neuroscience.
Meanwhile, BenevolentAI has hired Dr Ian Churcher as its new VP of drug discovery at its bioscience subsidiary BenevolentBio. He joins from GlaxoSmithKline, where he headed a Discovery Performance Unit focussed on progressing new approaches to drug discovery, including pioneering work on the development of Protein Degradation technology.
Prior to GSK Dr Churcher worked in the neuroscience group of Merck Sharp & Dohme where he focussed on Alzheimer’s research.
Jackie Hunter, CEO of BenevolentBio, said: “Ian is a well-recognised and respected in the pharma industry. He has focussed much of his career on innovating the drug discovery process and increasing the efficiency of bringing new medicines to patients.
“This experience fits perfectly with what BenevolentBio are doing – using AI to disrupt traditional drug discovery methods and using technology to accelerate drug development, so we are very pleased to welcome Ian to BenevolentBio.”
