Academic CV — the short version#
This is a short, framed extract of LLoL’s full 46-page academic CV (PDF), because few readers will want the whole monster — and because the full document carries something a normal CV does not, which is worth explaining before you open it.
The short version#
Laurence Loewe is a research scientist who set aside a career in quantitative biology in 2020 to work on existential risk full-time.
Dr. rer. nat. (magna cum laude), Technical University of Munich, 2002 — evolutionary bioinformatics and the prediction of genetic stability in asexual genomes via global distributed computing.
Postdoctoral research, University of Edinburgh (2003–2010) — theoretical population genetics, process-algebra modelling, quantitative systems biology.
Assistant Professor of Medical Genetics, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and faculty of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery (from 2011), anchored by a 2012 NSF Career Award ($1.06M).
30+ refereed articles in journals including Science, Nature Ecology & Evolution, Genetics, PLoS Biology, and BMC Systems Biology; work covered by the BBC, The Times, and other international media.
Best known for foundational work on Muller’s ratchet theory, mechanistic evolutionary systems biology, and the creation of Evolvix, a programming language for accurate modelling of biological systems under uncertainty.
Why this CV also contains two letters to a bank#
The full document is unusual: it also includes two letters LLoL wrote to his bank. They are kept in, deliberately, as honest evidence of the timeline — and because they teach a lesson that turns out to be central to the whole project.
2023-03-31 — a four-page business-plan description. It is evidence that this work was already well under way years ago. It is also a candid record of the author’s own time-blindness: back then he expected to reach the decision point by the end of 2023.
2023-12-13 — a report that he had made major progress (true), that the threats had grown worse (also true), and that he now faced a new kind of “escape-trolley problem.” For those reasons he chose to stay in the race — despite the confident-sounding deadline he had set himself nine months earlier.
The lesson — and why it matters for ResearchCity#
The 2023 deadline came and went. Since then there has been far more progress than the author could have predicted — the poster exhibit that grew larger and better than imagined by the end of 2025, and the entire Matheo Study Series (with substantial AI help) that he could not have foreseen at all. The race is still on, the world is in a worse state, and the work is still going.
The lesson is simple, and it is load-bearing: if ResearchCity is to succeed, it must let people work on what they do for as long as the work genuinely needs in Reality. There is much more to say about how to keep that time from being wasted — that is the whole reason for the Jubilee System of ZION algorithms — but the core is this: pinning research to a deadline you cannot actually know is Blindly Assuming Authorized Leadership (BAAL), the worship of a false certainty, and over the long term it is deadly. So the hedging and care here about not locking in what is not yet known is not indecision; it is the opposite of BAAL.