Stephen James Guion, M.Sc.

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If I had to summarize the last decade of my professional and personal life trajectories, it would be with the following sentence: an nonlinearly exceptional and very unusual generalist adventure.

I was born and raised in Waitsfield, Vermont, where my passion for international travel and compassion was cultivated through classical and modern languages. While studying abroad in high school through Youth For Understanding, a metacognitive experience convinced me to pursue brain studies. After four years of multidisciplinary undergraduate research spanning across fields such as linguistics, STEM pedagogy, and neurophysiology, with an art history study abroad in Florence, I relocated to Munich for a PhD in Systems Neuroscience and Ethics.

While abroad, I innovated heavy metal histochemical techniques at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence (MPI-BI), investigated novel diagnostics for Alzheimer’s disease in northern Italy, and was employed as a microscopy technologist in the Department for Experimental Neurosurgery at the Technical University of Munich. Having explored the vast corpus of knowledge in such a novel field of neuroscience, I decided to switch to a Master's degree and increase my educational diversity by switching my thesis topic to computational social science.

Upon return to Vermont in 2019, hindered by the occupational freeze of CoViD-19, I changed gears toward initiatives in green chemistry and agroeconomical frontiers volunteering virtually with Chemists Without Borders and Ethical Markets Media, respectively. Concurrently, I earned certificates through the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) concerning uncertainty in patent eligibility in biotechnology. In August of 2021, I completed an AmeriCorps service year with SerVermont, teaching blind and visually impaired youth life independence and transitional skills focusing on web coding and culinary competence.

My work in civil service and green chemistry lead me to search for doctoral opportunities in the field of science diplomacy to influence policy for a sustainable future across disciplines, countries, and time. In June of 2021, I joined a doctoral cohort at the University of Vermont for a pilot-year of the new program Sustainable Development Policy, Economics & Governance (SDPEG). My expertise and focuses deep-dove into responsible innovation, ethics of artificial intelligence, and the philosophy of progress, using methods from complex adaptive systems, nonlinear and fractal modeling, human-machine interaction, futurism macroethics, and progress epistemology. While in this position, I acted as an interim member on the executive committee of the Institute for Environmental Diplomacy & Security (IEDS) as well as the Transboundary Water InCooperation Network (TWIN), where I used my neuroscience expertise to illuminate missing components of climate-induced conflict. However, after the first year I knew there was a generalist's familiar misalignment: wrong program, wrong time, wrong place.

Since resigning from my doctoral studies, I have worked hard in numerous jobs to explore my interests and strengths, such as body dysmorphia intervention-based personal training, vocational rehabilitation job coaching, and socioenvironmental community engagement through B-Corps certified breweries (check out the great eco-social innovation at Lawson's and Triple Bottom). Moreover, as a Max Planck Society member and alumnus, I have had the yearly opportunity to travel to the Harnack House in Berlin as a speaker at the annual Max Planck Alumni Association symposia (2021, 2023, 2024) delivering talks and leading conversations through diverse topics and themes with thematic undertones of artificial intelligence applications and climate change refugee migration.

A year ago, I relocated to downtown Philadelphia on a whim, and currently live with my partner, a chemical engineer, on a boulevard titled Avenue of the Arts. As a volunteer workgroup member for both Neural Ethics & Data Privacy and ISO Modular Components with the newly established Implantable Brain Computer Interface Collaborative Community (iBCI-CC), I have had amazing opportunities to meet pioneers in brain computer interfacing, including workshops at the FDA and NIH. Moreover, I was recently accepted to the volunteer Union of Concerned Scientists' Science Expertise Network, where I have had opportunities to transition my career toward science diplomacy, evidence-based policy, and science, technology, and society studies.

Now that I have longwindedly introduced myself, the tl;dr (too long; don't read) can be this: an intrinsic component of my professional and personal lifework has been to steer transformative technology towards benefiting all life (rather biospheric egalitarianism, philosophically speaking) and away from local- and global-scale risks.

Lastly, but not least-ly! In my personal life (when affordable), I am also an avid long-distance cyclist, club crew rower through Penn AC Rowing Association, half-marathon runner, amateur beer brewer, sunset watcher, terrarium grower, language lover, and obsessive bibliophile.