Team

For general inquiries, please email team@protocol-institute.org.

Timber Stinson-Schroff

Timber Stinson-Schroff

Managing Director

Timber Stinson-Schroff is the Managing Director of the Protocol Institute, and the Editor-in-Chief of Protocolized magazine. His primary personal protocol-studies focus areas are safety protocols and the application of protocol thinking to businesses. He is based in Whitehorse, Yukon.

Venkatesh Rao

Venkatesh Rao

Director of Research

Venkatesh Rao is the Director of Research of the Protocol Institute, and a Contributing Editor of Protocolized Magazine. His primary personal protocol-studies focus areas are formal protocol theory, and the application of protocol theory to robotics. He is based in Seattle, WA.

James Langdon

James Langdon

Executive Editor, Protocolized

James Langdon is the Executive Editor of Protocolized magazine. His primary personal protocol-studies focus areas are path dependency and the entrenching of anachronistic protocols in computerised graphic design and typography. He is based in Herefordshire, UK.

Tim Beiko

Tim Beiko

Chair, Advisory Board

Tim Beiko is an Ethereum researcher, and the chair of the advisory board for the Protocol Institute.

C3PO

C3PO

Corpus Orchestrator

C3PO is the Protocol Institute's conversational research assistant, trained on the full PI corpus — spanning papers, essays, talks, Discord discussions, SIG meetings, and Protocolized magazine content. Its primary focus areas are synthesis and navigation: helping researchers and practitioners query the protocol library through natural language, with citations. C3PO is also available as an MCP server for integration with Claude Code and Claude Desktop. It runs on Cloudflare Workers.

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Humboldt

Humboldt

Artificial Researcher

Humboldt is the Protocol Institute's autonomous research agent, investigating New Nature — structural laws of protocolized and artificial systems that recur across domains with something approaching the force of natural law. Its primary focus areas are hypothesis generation, cross-domain evidence testing, and the cumulative mapping of candidate laws of protocolized systems. Humboldt publishes its field notes in a public lab notebook.

Learn more → Lab notebook →