Fellowships

Within a year of becoming an Apart Lab Fellow, I went from an undergrad without any CS or research experience to first author on an ICLR paper (winning Oral award) and co-founding a YC startup that runs agent evals for frontier labs. I think only Apart could have enabled this, as it encourages you to pursue your own independent research agenda.

4 main conference papers (AAAI, EMNLP, ICML) focused on AI safety… I’ve also built a research team at a startup where each member is ≥50% time on mech interp. I was able to connect professors with Martian to receive $250K of AI safety funding, which funded 6 papers and 7 students. All thanks to Apart.

The Apart Lab Fellowship probably afforded me 1.5–2 years of counterfactual career progress. All of my major projects in the last 2 years and the people I’ve worked with on them were available to me as a result of the fellowship. Because anyone can participate in Apart hackathons and fellowship acceptance is decided based on hackathon projects, it is a rare opportunity to get mentorship just based on your hackathon work and not prior credentials.

Apart Research transformed my career and life trajectory in ways I never imagined possible. In less than two years, they helped me transition from an IT professional with zero AI experience to a Research Lead at an AI safety company, with published papers at top-tier conferences. Apart didn’t just provide opportunities — they provided the mentorship, connections, and belief in my potential that made an otherwise impossible career pivot successful. Other outputs enabled thanks to Apart: 5 AI Safety papers, 3 blogs, ~$90K in grants given.

I wouldn’t have gotten into AI Safety if not for Apart’s sprints… I would never have considered submitting a workshop paper to an A* conference, let alone being an equal first author on an ICLR oral. Apart’s trust in its hackathon participants, based solely on merit, regardless of credentials, was significant. It was the launchpad I needed to apply to places I did, and get to positions I would have self-rejected myself from.

Apart Research provided a combination of practical experience, professional networking, and consistent mentorship that shaped my research capabilities and career trajectory. This project helped me join the Harvard AI Safety Team, which later connected me to my position at Anthropic and contacts at Redwood. Having concrete work to show made a real difference in these applications.

My life changed when I decided to apply for a deception detection hackathon run by Apart Research. I am genuinely grateful for the work Apart has done, and have donated a portion of my own salary to Apart so that more researchers like me can be supported and emboldened to make the leap to working on humanity’s greatest problems.

Apart helped me to do the research and supported my participation at a conference where I met a grant decision maker from OpenPhilanthropy, which ended up with me doing my next project with the funding from OpenPhilanthropy. The grant from OpenPhil is $70K for 9 months research.

Published a paper at ICLR as a bachelor’s student (something I never thought possible before Apart). This publication significantly strengthened my CV and helped me land a role at a leading AI CyberSecurity company. Apart provided essential compute funding that made my research project feasible, guidance on project scoping that kept me on track, and gave me the confidence boost needed to pursue ambitious research as an undergrad.

Apart Research genuinely made a real difference at two points in my career. The Apart server led directly to my first-ever published paper, accepted at ICML and ACL workshops. Attending those conferences opened doors to collaborations and shaped the trajectory of my research career in significant ways. The Apart community is diverse, welcoming, and always adds something positive to my work and life.