People & Partnerships

Research is stronger when it is built in the open, together.

CAIRN Institute is an independent applied AI research organization. We work with researchers, students, and local institutions to turn promising technical directions into inspectable public research surfaces.

Discuss a partnership Team

Team

Open research, built to be used.

Ken Janik, Ph.D.

Founder & Principal Investigator

Ken Janik founded CAIRN Institute to bring a long career in computing architecture and AI systems into focused, public-interest research. His work spans processor design at Intel, high-performance computing platforms, and the current generation of large-scale biological and AI models.

At Intel, Ken contributed to the architecture and development of Pentium-era processors and Xeon/Xeon Phi platforms. At NVIDIA, his work has included the Grace CPU, BioNeMo, and the training of Arc Institute's Evo 2 genomic foundation model. At CAIRN, that experience informs an applied research program built around useful technical artifacts: code, datasets, methods, and validation material that others can assess and build on.

View Ken's LinkedIn profile

University Partnerships

Local collaboration, built around real research work.

CAIRN welcomes partnerships with local universities and research groups where an independent applied-AI effort can complement existing expertise, student training, and domain data. We are particularly interested in collaborations that lead to careful, public-facing research outputs.

Research collaboration

Joint work on focused questions in genomics, accessibility, or bioacoustics, grounded in domain expertise and explicit evaluation.

Student projects

Well-scoped projects that let students contribute to datasets, tooling, methods, validation, and clear technical documentation.

Shared public releases

Code, data, research notes, and reproducible materials designed to extend a collaboration's value beyond a single project cycle.