Dr. Evelyn Sarkis

Feature from Cognition Quarterly – Volume 78, Issue 3

Where Is Evelyn Sarkis? by Mina Shalev

You don’t “follow” Evelyn Sarkis. You study her — carefully, like a rare astronomical event, or a set of encrypted notes that might vanish if viewed directly.

Her early work in neural modeling was considered audacious. Then it became foundational. By the time she was 34, Sarkis had proposed two new frameworks for synthetic cognition, redefined machine emotion as more than just heuristic, and walked out of a DARPA conference with half the room stunned into silence. She was that rare scientific force who could publish in Nature one week and dismantle a panel discussion with a single question the next.

And then she disappeared.

No official statement. No farewell tour. One year she was keynote at NeuroTech Summit; the next, her lab was shuttered and her name quietly disappeared from the boards of several major think tanks. She stopped answering emails. Her last published paper ended with a phrase that’s still debated in ethics forums:

“If we fear what we build, it’s not the machine we should question.”

Is she underground? Off-grid? Working on something too big — or too dangerous — to talk about?

Those of us who still cite her work (and we do, constantly) like to think she’s still out there. Thinking. Watching. Building.
After all, if Evelyn Sarkis is silent, it’s only because she’s already moved three steps ahead.