About
I’m Nathan Thornhill. I live in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and I do neuroscience, complexity science, and AI research on my own time. Nobody assigns it to me and nobody pays me for it.
I came to it from healthcare. Several years in long-term care as a nursing assistant. Not the best pay, but truly meaningful, and I liked it enough to go back and certify as a Medication Tech. Later, nursing home administration. Eventually, ICU admissions and administration. Same question, different rooms.
The question is what part of a person is actually the person. Where does it live, physically? When does it stop being there? Why does someone with Alzheimer’s stay recognizably themselves for a long stretch and then, on some unmarked day, stop? In long-term care you watch that happen slowly, over years, with the family in the doorway the whole time. The ICU is the acute version. Bodies that keep running on machines while the person stopped being there hours or days ago. Then the other thing, the one nobody on shift gets used to. Terminal lucidity. A patient who has been somewhere else for weeks comes back sharp and present, talks to their son or daughter, says the thing they needed to say, and dies that night. Whatever was missing for those weeks was, briefly, back. And then it wasn’t.
If I’m honest the question was there before any of that. Long before. Weird things happened in the house I grew up in that I couldn’t fit into any standard category. People would call that paranormal. I dislike that word, paranormal; and I have always wondered whether what happened there had a scientific explanation. That maybe what we ran into was not only real, but somewhat normal.
So I taught myself the math and the engineering to go after it.
I don’t have a PhD or a computer science degree. I taught myself guitar as a kid and code as an adult, so picking up a field from the outside was already familiar, and it is mostly stubbornness and a lot of late nights. It also means I have been rejected by more journals than I can count.
Which is part of why I started the Institute for Complexity Science and Advanced Computing. I didn’t make ICSAC just for me. I made it for the vast number of people like me. Independent researchers. Citizen scientists. Those whose work is unaffiliated with any institution or big agency, but is just as rigorous. Those who may be lacking a specific niche word, or term, but who understand their research and can demonstrate it. Most importantly, for those who simply can’t afford APCs and author fees. ICSAC charges authors nothing to publish.
The rest of the week I run 3Rivers WebTech here in Fort Wayne. Websites, point-of-sale, and AI workflow automation for small businesses, plus AI advisory for owners trying to work out what to automate and what to leave alone. I also built CiteStamp, which catches the citation your AI made up. It is free to use.
The research happens in the margins of all that, mostly at night, while attempting to dodge the eye-rolls and sassiness of a teenaged daughter. Off the clock it’s family, the lawn, the house, and whatever the kid is asking about that week.
The actual work is on the publications page. Talks are on the speaking page, coverage on the press page.