Fellowship | Active Inference Institute

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Fellows develop research, applications, or public resources aligned with the Institute and Ecosystem, provide regular progress reports, and produce outputs that advance the field and remain publicly accessible.

What Fellows Do

Fellows work on a defined project or area of focus — research, software, educational materials, ontology, applications, or ecosystem support — and report on their progress at regular intervals. Reporting is public: fellows share updates through the community newsletter, project meetings, or public posts. These outputs accumulate into a body of work that is available to the entire Active Inference community and beyond.

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What a Fellowship Requires

Fellowship requires a meaningful time commitment and a clear scope. Fellows are expected to make progress on their defined work, communicate regularly about that progress, and deliver results that are useful to others. The specific requirements — reporting cadence, deliverables — are established between the fellow and the Institute at the start of the fellowship. The Research Fellow role is an unpaid, non-employee position with a default term of two years, possibly renewable.

Current Research Fellows

The Institute's current Research Fellows, their appointment start, project focus, ORCID iD, and their own description of the research are listed in the table below. The roster is generated from the Institute's fellows registry, so it reflects the current appointments rather than a snapshot fixed in prose.

Who Should Apply

Fellowship is suited for people who have already engaged with the Institute through volunteering, internship, or independent research and are ready to take on a larger, more sustained commitment. Prior experience with Active Inference is expected — fellows are contributors who can work with significant autonomy on a defined problem. If you are new to the Institute, starting through volunteering or internship is the recommended path to fellowship.

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Application Requirements

A complete Research Fellow application package includes confirmation that the applicant has read and agreed to the Fellows Program terms; a research proposal of one to six pages (excluding citations) with a 300-word-or-less abstract, research questions and objectives, significance, approach, alignment with the Institute's mission, anticipated outcomes, and timeline; a current CV; one to three letters of recommendation; and up to five representative publications or products. Completed packages and questions go to blanket@activeinference.institute with [RESEARCH FELLOWS] in the subject line.

Outputs and Public Record

Fellowship outputs are intended to be publicly useful. Papers, software repositories, educational course materials, ontology contributions, datasets, and project documentation all count as fellowship outputs. The Institute supports fellows in making their work findable, citable, and reusable by the broader community. Published outputs are part of the permanent public record of the Institute's research and educational work.

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How to Become a Fellow

Fellowship begins with a conversation about your proposed work and how it aligns with Institute and Ecosystem goals. The fellows pathway page describes the current process for expressing interest and proposing a fellowship scope. Most fellowships develop from existing participation — active contributors who want to formalize and deepen their engagement.

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Fellowship Terms

The Research Fellow role is unpaid and non-employee, governed by a signed offer letter and a set of program terms. Fellows provide regular (e.g. quarterly) progress reports describing their research activities, achievements, and challenges, and participate in an annual evaluation. The Institute does not claim any access to a Fellow's private work, and a Fellow's participation in Institute programs does not affect the Fellow's or the Institute's IP rights. Fellows are encouraged, though not required, to list "Research Fellow, Active Inference Institute" as a professional affiliation on related outputs.

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Current Research Fellows

9 current Research Fellows

Each fellow works on a defined scope of research and reports on it publicly. Rows come from the Institute's Research Fellows roster.

Current Research Fellows at the Active Inference Institute.
Fellow	Position	Fellow since	Focus	ORCID	Research
Alexander Hemming	Research Fellow	3/2026	Foundations of Ideology	—	Cross-disciplinary framework rooted in political neuroscience offering a normative account of how ideologies form, update, and interact, grounded in the Free Energy Principle.
Jake Hooper	Research Fellow	3/2026	—	—	—
Mahault Albarracin	Research Fellow	3/2026	AI2C: Active Inference Alignment Coalition	0000-0003-0916-4645	Proposal for the Active Inference Alignment Coalition, a multi-institution consortium producing large-scale proposals for AI alignment grounded in the Free Energy Principle and Active Inference, with a standardized governance framework, reusable proposal modules, and shared infrastructure for evidence synthesis, benchmarking, and stakeholder engagement.
Hongju Pae	Research Fellow	11/2025	Perspective Architectures for Coherent and Attuned Artificial Agency	0000-0002-5174-8858	Develops computational and theoretical frameworks for modeling how artificial agents form perspective, maintain coherent affect, and achieve developmental alignment, integrating Active Inference with phenomenological insights. Builds simulation prototypes toward testable architectures of sentience for safe, ecologically grounded machine minds.
Sheila Macrine	Research Fellow	11/2025	Multi-dimensional taxonomy of agency	0000-0002-8600-0938	Extends the framework from the forthcoming book 'Embodied Intelligence: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Natural, Artificial, and Hybrid Systems' (MIT Press, 2026). Proposes a multi-dimensional taxonomy of agency formalizing nine qualitative dimensions — intentionality, autonomy, reflexivity, and others — as tunable Active Inference parameters, distinguishing agency (the driver) from intelligence (the engine).
Shagor Rahman	Research Fellow	8/2025	Myth of Objectivity	0009-0004-0460-0078	Investigates how morality and symbolic thought co-evolved (the Myth of Objectivity Hypothesis): the capacity to model shared cultural expectations enabled humans to transcend individual perspectives. Uses multi-agent active inference simulations and transcendental model selection, and offers a perspective on AI and AGI alignment.
Robert Worden	Research Fellow	10/2024	Wave Hypothesis	0000-0001-7304-2752	Two main research interests: 3-D spatial cognition, proposing wave-based rather than pure neural-firing models of consciousness in the thalamus and insect central body; and language, covering its evolution, learning, and brain mechanisms.
Jean-François Cloutier	Research Fellow	5/2024	Symbolic Cognitive Robotics	0009-0001-1841-2279	I seek to find out what it takes, at a minimum, for a robot to learn, on its own, how to survive in a world it knows initially almost nothing about. Continuation of a project of many years programming simple autonomous robots to develop and ground understanding of cognition. Drawn into Active Inference, Kantian epistemology, map vs territory, biosemiotics, mortal computing, collective intelligence, autopoiesis and constraint closure.
John Boik	Research Fellow	5/2024	Cognitive Narrative Ecosystem (CogNarr)	0000-0003-1289-7997	Continuation of work described in a book and two series of concept papers exploring science-driven de novo development of new cognitive architectures fit for purpose. First series: new societal (economic and governance) systems as components of a society's cognitive architecture. Second series: an online ecosystem facilitating cognition in the large-group setting.