Jeroen van Gorsel

My passion for computer programming goes very far back. I have been programming on and off for fun since I was a kid. In high school, I worked as a web developer for a few small local companies, building custom CMS systems. I even won a European prize for one of my projects, Project Minos, an online database of untranslated ancient clay tablets that I built from scratch with PHP and MySQL.

Later, I moved to Leiden to study Physics and Astrophysics (with some detours into computer science and linguistics). I always found building computational models a powerful and interesting way to understand complex systems.

While studying Physics, I got drawn further and further into the world of Theoretical Physics and String Theory. I did my PhD in Swansea on six-dimensional superconformal field theories and the AdS/CFT correspondence: a specific example of the holographic duality, which aims to explain how spacetime emerges from quantum entanglement patterns, by showing through concrete examples how gravity in a higher-dimensional spacetime can be encoded in a lower-dimensional quantum theory on its boundary.

Throughout it all I built simulations of various complex physical systems: of the propagation of gravitational waves through curved spacetimes, quantum field theories, and string theory on highly chaotic backgrounds.

Like many people I have always been drawn to these fundamental questions that have haunted human thought for millennia. What is space? What is time? What, ultimately, is the Universe?

Since I have left Academia I've been fortunate to work on a wide range of technical challenges in the Financial sector, from building Monte Carlo simulations for option pricing, to developing machine learning models, to now designing and implementing agentic AI systems.

I've co-founded SHAI Creative Technologies, a VC-backed generative-AI Studio for video generation, where I focused on the deeper engineering and research challenges of creating scalable, high-quality image and video generation systems.

Throughout my career, I've been fascinated by the question of how complex phenomena can emerge from simple underlying rules and interactions. In physics, the emergence of spacetime and gravity from quantum entanglement. In AI, I continually find myself drawn to a similar question: how does intelligence emerge from quantitative systems?