Michael D. Norman

1996

Cisco · Lucent Technologies · UMass Amherst

Started in networking and systems at 15. IT at Cisco, lab work at Lucent, network engineering through college. Built infrastructure before learning to think about it.

2005

Bose Corporation

Embedded systems engineering. The interesting problems weren't in the components. They were in what happened when components interacted.

2009

Complexity Scientist

PhD in Complex Systems Science at Florida Atlantic University. NSF Doctoral Fellow. Published on psychotherapy dynamics using non-linear equations (151 combined citations). The thread connecting everything since: how simple rules create complex, unpredictable behavior.

2012

MITRE Corporation

A decade applying complexity science to national security. Built MITRE Labs' complexity science capability from the ground up. Led Web3 corporate strategy reporting directly to the CEO. Presented systemic risk and DeFi centralization research to U.S. Treasury via the FFRDC. Among the first to run multi-agent PPO on NVIDIA GPUs via Unity ML-Agents days after release.

2022

Consensys

Recruited by Joe Lubin's team to design token incentive structures across the Ethereum ecosystem. Rose to Director of Strategy in the CEO's office. Published the first academic work on emergent trust in public blockchain networks.

2025

CNS Labs · Shodai · Plexmark

Building Shodai — the agreements protocol and coordination infrastructure for the agentic economy — at CNS Labs (backed by Joe Lubin). Running Plexmark as a strategic and technical consultancy. Operating production multi-agent systems daily. Studying and building with agents since before most people knew what the word meant.