I
Cognisom
Pioneering multi-scale cellular digital twins to understand and simulate the foundational building blocks of life — from protein folding to whole-cell dynamics.
Read the brief →For the people the system leaves behind.
for the benefit of everyone, especially them.
Two people, one fault line: the worker automation displaces without a plan for what comes next, and the young adult a care system ages out and forgets. The Walker Conway Foundation works that fault line from two sides — rigorous research into the systems, and direct programs for the people. The first of those programs is the Catch-22 Project.
Mission
The Walker Conway Foundation funds the research, frameworks, and oversight that keep emerging intelligence — biological, artificial, and the systems that connect them — answerable to the people it can most easily fail.
We do that work along two lines. Our Research arm — Cognisom, Cogs, and the AI Watch Lab — builds the science, the safeguards, and the oversight that keep emerging intelligence honest. Our Programs arm puts that same conviction within direct reach of people, beginning with the Catch-22 Project. The worker an algorithm displaces and the young adult a care system loses are not separate concerns to us — they are the same promise, kept in two places.
The Catch-22 Project
Each year, thousands of autistic young adults age out of foster care and into a catch-22 of deadlines — set as early as age 22 — that can quietly decide the rest of their lives. The Catch-22 Project pairs research and assistive technology with direct, human advocacy to get them across in time.
It began with one person: Paul — disabled before adulthood, but past the age-22 threshold by weeks, his lifetime benefits lowered by a deadline no one told him to watch. That is the catch we exist to close; the fuller story is Our Story.
Three lines of inquiry,
one charter.
Each program is led by an independent principal investigator under a shared charter — open publication, reproducible methods, and an ethics review with the authority to halt work. Together they are the Foundation’s Research arm.
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Cogs
Developing emotional-learning frameworks for humanoid robotics — empathy treated as a system property to design for — and the assistive, affect-aware tools that follow when machines built to read people are turned toward those most often misread.
Read the brief →III
AI Watch Lab
Building the liability tests and certification frameworks for the secure adoption of enterprise and agentic AI — and studying how those systems enter the workforce, so the people whose work they change are protected, not displaced.
Read the brief →The non-negotiables.
These four commitments are written into the Foundation's charter and reviewed annually by an external ethics board. They are conditions of receiving Foundation support, not aspirations.
All foundation-funded research is published open-access. Methods, data, and negative results are shared on a defined cadence — not when convenient.
Commercial entities founded or held by foundation principals are disclosed in full and walled off from grant decisions through an independent ethics review.
The foundation accepts no funding that conditions a research outcome. Donor influence ends at the moment of the gift.
Every research initiative is evaluated against a single durable test: does it expand the conditions for human flourishing, or merely human consumption?
No one should age out of being seen.
Give to the Catch-22 Project, partner on a transition-advocacy pilot, or bring your research to the Foundation's charter. We welcome inquiries from funders, academic partners, and independent researchers alike.