Siegel’s annual Ask Me Anything webinar is an opportunity for our friends and partners to learn about our plans for the year ahead and ask questions about our work and approach. This year’s event, held virtually on Thursday, February 5th, brought together over 315 attendees.
With support from the Siegel Family Endowment, the newly renamed MIT Siegel Family Quest for Intelligence investigates how brains produce intelligence and how it can be replicated to solve problems.
Siegel Family Endowment is proud to announce the 2025–2026 cohort of Siegel Research Fellows. This cohort brings together a group of scholars and practitioners working at the intersections of technology, labor, and governance. Spanning economics, computer science, law, ethnography, public policy, and public interest technology, the fellows are united by a shared focus on power, participation, and accountability in technological systems.
The MIT Quest for Intelligence has been renamed the MIT Siegel Family Quest for Intelligence in recognition of support from David Siegel. SQI’s goal is to understand intelligence — how brains produce it and how it can be replicated in artificial systems to address real-world problems that exceed the capabilities of current AI technologies.
From The Siegel Times, a special edition of our Year in Review, President and Executive Director Katy Knight examines the blueprints, partnerships, and strategies behind 2025’s most under-covered success stories.
Introducing The Siegel Times: our 2025 Year in Review, inspired by the look and feel of a classic news magazine and grounded in the work we’ve built together this year. More than a retrospective, this special report brings together feature stories from grantees, letters from leadership, and a clear record of what we’ve accomplished collectively—alongside playful, interactive moments designed to put the buzzwords of 2025 to rest and refocus on what actually matters. It’s a snapshot of a year defined not by hype, but by shared effort, learning, and progress.
At Siegel Family Endowment, we’ve spent the first half of 2025 contending with profound uncertainty—not as a problem to solve, but as a condition to navigate with intention, curiosity, and collective wisdom. A bit past the midway point in the year, Siegel President and Executive Director Katy Knight would like to share three questions that have shaped our thinking in the hope that they might resonate with your own.
As we reflect on the past year, it’s clear that artificial intelligence has dominated discussions across various domains. What surprises us, however, is not the volume of conversation but rather its lack of nuance. Having navigated many cycles of technological development, we recognize the urgent need to move beyond the simplistic “gloom vs. doom” narrative. Instead, we must critically examine what these technologies can do, what they cannot, and—most importantly—what we truly need from them.
Our latest grants reaffirm our commitment to building a more inclusive technological future by supporting comprehensive research, shaping human-centered policies, and fostering community-driven innovation to ensure these advancements benefit everyone.
Siegel Family Endowment and the Walton Family Foundation are thrilled to announce five Phase 2 winners that will receive $200,000 each and advance to the Phase 3 incubator in the Learning Landscapes Challenge. These winners emerged from an exceptional cohort of 40 Phase 2 accelerator teams with transformative visions for K-12 educational infrastructure.
The U.S. National Science Foundation announced an inaugural investment of more than $18 million to 44 multidisciplinary, multi-sector teams across the U.S. through the NSF Responsible Design, Development and Deployment of Technologies (NSF ReDDDoT) program.