Africa Initiative

Daniel Goodwin is a Visiting Fellow at the Africa Initiative. He is an entrepreneur and scientist who builds companies and research institutions where software, science and policy intersect.

He started as an engineer focused on software. After a BS from Harvey Mudd College and an MS from Stanford advised by Fei-Fei Li, he was an entrepreneur-in-residence at IDEO, the global design firm, and at StartX, Stanford's student accelerator. At IDEO he helped launch "Elmo Calls," a number-one app with Sesame Street. He then co-founded MileIQ as its founding CTO, building the app that logs business mileage automatically. Microsoft acquired MileIQ in 2015.

At thirty he left software for neuroscience. He earned a PhD in neurotechnology and synthetic biology at MIT, co-advised by Ed Boyden, George Church and Sebastian Seung, building new tools to map the brain. His thesis work on expansion sequencing, a method for reading RNA in place inside intact tissue, was published in Science in 2021.

Drawing on his synthetic biology training, he co-founded Homeworld Collective, a nonprofit backed by leading science philanthropists, to accelerate biotechnology's capacity to solve for climate problems. As founding Executive Director, he launched Garden Grants, an early-stage program that funded the first experiments of 30 climate biotech teams. He also led Homeworld's internal research, including automated techno-economic analysis tools and rapid discovery of bottlenecks in critical mineral supply chains.

He writes independent essays at Punk Rock Bio about engineering communities of practice, under-appreciated technical problems, and mapping civilizational paths through the AI transition decade of 2025–2035. His mission is to help the world navigate the AI transition peacefully and successfully, toward an exciting and abundant future.