2025 In Review

Another year comes to an end and so: it is time to review the year.

2025 was a year of transition for me. After three years as a Research Fellow at Open Philanthropy, I moved away from pure research to other ventures: starting new projects, doing more public writing, and (slightly horrifyingly) becoming a public intellectual.

Indeed, I did a lot of public writing this year, I think perhaps more than I’ve ever done before. I wrote for Asterisk, Works in Progress and Foreign Policy; I wrote policy memos for the Energy for Growth Hub and the Centre for British Progress; I summarized the research frontier with Gavin Leech and Ulkar Aghayeva.

And, of course, there was this Substack. Choosing my favorite pieces that I’ve written is a bit like choosing a favorite child, but I was particularly proud of:

• My literature review on return migration. I open the post by saying that “people often assume that once a migrant arrives, they are likely to stay for life. This is not true.” I think this is an important thing to keep in mind when thinking about immigration; not every immigrant is going to stay forever!

• Doing some weighted averages on incomes for recent immigrants to the UK and finding out that… actually, their earnings are fine. This piece made a large portion of the right-wing internet very angry with me, but several people have told me it also changed their mind on the economic prospects of the so-called “Boriswave”.

• These ideas for metascience conferences that I think should exist. In 2026, I hope to work on making them exist in the real world.

My writing has also gotten some external recognition. One of my pieces in Asterisk made Séb Krier’s list of his favorite pieces of 2025. Work published on this Substack was cited in The Guardian and The Critic; it spawned work published by UK in a changing Europe and an interview on LBC.

But my biggest accomplishments of 2025 were definitely my two new ventures.

For much of the year, I was the founding programme manager for RenPhil's Horizon Scanning Study Group, coordinating leading scientists and technologists to assess UK science priorities. I'm excited to see its first output report in 2026.

Most importantly, though: I launched In Development with support from Emergent Ventures. We’ve built an incredible team, with contributing editors Jake Eaton, Chinmay Ingalagavi, and Akib Khan. We are hard at work on issue 1, and have already grown to 500 subscribers. It even made the Equiano Institute’s list of progress towards human flourishing - before it even publishes its first piece.

I’m so excited for you all to read its first issue in 2026.

Happy New Year!