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2026 Emergentia Internship

Big Questions Institute is excited to partner with Emergentia to deliver the inaugural Emergentia Internship program in March – May 2026 at Cicada Innovations, Sydney.

We’re pleased to support University of Sydney PhD candidate Stephen Smith in furthering research for his thesis, ‘Testing the physical nature of intelligence’. Throughout the internship, Stephen will receive support from the University of Sydney Graduate Research School, the Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute and supervisor Dr Zdenka Kuncic, Emergentia co-founder and CTO.

Throughout the internship program Stephen will have access Emergentia’s proprietary technology to test his hypothesis, namely that intelligence can emerge from many-body interactions in complex physical systems. Emergentia leverages advanced nanotechnology to create electronic devices comprised of millions of nanoelectronic resistive switching elements that are highly interconnected. Stephen will investigate how the interplay between these physical processes and their network connectivity can give rise to emergent phenomena, such as dynamical phase transitions, and how these properties may contribute to information processing. To quantify this, Stephen will be given an opportunity to collaborate on a project with one of our strategic partners, ESA F-Lab, the “blue-sky” research arm of ESA, which is seeking to find better ways to explore space with next-generation intelligent machines.