Meet The Team
Jacob Shwartz-Lucas
Executive Director
Jacob is a biotechnologist who has contributed to food security (Africa), and his ideas on cleaning water (Asia) have attracted international aid funding. Originally focused on alleviating poverty, he interviewed economists about this during his stint at Harvard, and later did so with Nobelists on Stanford University Radio. He created Invincible Wellbeing to minimize what effectively makes humanitarian crises morally urgent -life's underlying capacity to suffer.
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David Pearce
Director of Bioethics
David is a philosopher and the author of The Hedonistic Imperative which outlines a bold vision for phasing out the biology of suffering. He is the co-founder of the World Transhumanist Association / Humanity+ with Nick Bostrom. His work has centered on why we should prioritize retaining fitness-enhancing behavior, without relying on negative states of experience. To do this, he proposes replacing the pleasure pain axis with a pleasure (more) pleasure axis, thus retaining and potentially enhancing motivational-salience.
Mark Mollineaux
Stanford University Radio
Mark is the Program Director for KZSU Stanford, liaising between the station and Invincible Wellbeing. In 2016, Mark and Jacob launched HGP, a show about economic justice and ending poverty. The two have interviewed Nobel Prize winners and representatives from companies like Microsoft and YCombinator.
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Jonathan Holmén
Director of Development
Jonathan’s life goal is to reduce suffering via biotech R&D. With more than 10 years of experience in preclinical contract research, drug development, and management consulting, he has served on core teams responsible for generating investment toward IPOs (>$70M), and pharmaceutical out-licensing agreements (>$120M).
Coral Benfield
Student Researcher
Coral is a second year Biochemistry undergraduate at Oxford interested in cell signalling, genetics, and protein structure and function. She is curious about the history and philosophy of science and believes in an interdisciplinary approach to finding effective research paths.
Remarez Sheehan
Student Researcher
Remi is a fourth year medical student at Oxford with a medical sciences degree focused on cellular and systems neuroscience. He is interested in the mechanisms of deep brain stimulation and its application as a therapy for neurological and psychiatric diseases. Remi's focus is neurosurgery.
Adam Shriver
Honorary Committee Member
Adam Shriver is a philosopher with a Ph.D. from the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology program at Washington University in St. Louis. Prior to Oxford, he worked at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of British Columbia. Adam’s research examines the intersection of ethics and cognitive science and he has written multiple articles about human well-being and animal welfare. In particular, Adam’s research has examined the significance of the dissociation between the affective and sensory components of pain for philosophical theories of ethics and well-being. To this end, Adam has written about the relationship between pain and pleasure, the legal and ethical questions that arise from the search for a neural signature of pain in humans, and the capacity for suffering across different species.