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TechSocial Series - July 2026

14 July 2026, 4:00 pm–6:00 pm

TechSocials

As we head into the summer break, join us and Jeff Hammerbacher, Founder and CEO of Open Athena, to talk about 'Open Athena and Marin'

This event is free.

Event Information

Open to

All

Availability

Yes

Cost

Free

Organiser

ARC TechSocial Team – Centre of Advanced Research Computing

Location

Function space - 1st Floor
90 High Holborn
London
WC1V 6LJ
United Kingdom

Abstract

Open Athena is a new non-profit with operations in the US and UK that provides labs with engineers, compute, and coordination to build foundation models that are developed openly and sustained within academic systems. Open Athena's most significant effort is a partnership with Percy Liang's group at Stanford to develop the Marin large language model family. This talk will cover the history and motivations for creating Open Athena, the first set of scientific foundation model projects that Open Athena worked on, and provide more details on the present and future of Open Athena's contributions to the Marin project.

Free regsitration available via Pretix

Head to our TechSocial Series hompage for more information about future dates and speakers

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About the Speaker

Jeff Hammerbacher

CEO at Open Athena

Jeff Hammerbacher studied mathematics at Harvard, graduating in 2005. After a brief stint as a quantitative analyst at Bear Stearns, he joined Facebook in 2006, where he founded and led the company's Data team and helped popularize the title "data scientist." In 2008 he co-founded Cloudera, where he served as VP Product and later Chief Scientist through its 2017 IPO on the NYSE. From 2013 to 2019, Jeff was Assistant Professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and later the Medical University of South Carolina, where he ran the Hammer Lab which did research in computational cancer immunotherapy, contributing open-source tools for neoantigen prediction and personalized cancer vaccines. In 2020 he co-founded The COVID Tracking Project, and since 2024 he has been CEO of Open Athena. He also funds startups and non-profits with his wife Halle Tecco through their family office, Techammer.