Dan McCusker joined the Foundation in March 2025 as Program Associate in the Matter-to-Life program. Working with Ernie Glover, his responsibilities include developing, evaluating, and managing grant proposals for research investigating the principles by which matter organizes into complex, living systems.  

He completed his Ph.D. in applied physics at the University of Michigan, where his dissertation research analyzed stochasticity in the decision-making of biological systems. In this research, he investigated physical limitations on the ability of biological sensors to accurately measure chemical signals, as well as constraints on the ability of growing biological systems to measure and correctly specify their size (at the level of single cells, as well as entire organs). Prior to his PhD, he was a Fulbright Scholar at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. While in the Netherlands, McCusker also worked at Sobolt, a Dutch startup company using machine learning methods for applications in urban sustainability initiatives. He was previously a student researcher at CERN, investigating candidate dark matter production channels at the Large Hadron Collider. He earned his B.S. in physics from Georgetown University in 2016.