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Christopher Altman is an American physicist, artificial intelligence researcher, and NASA-trained commercial scientist-astronaut. His work spans evolutionary neural systems, quantum information science, superconducting quantum hardware, space systems, and evaluation methods for frontier artificial intelligence.
Altman began his scientific career at Starlab, the multidisciplinary research laboratory in Brussels, where he served as a research scientist, Global Coordinator, and Managing Director of the international CAM-Brain teams. The project developed large-scale evolutionary neural architectures using reconfigurable hardware, and its CAM-Brain Machine was recognized in Guinness World Records 2001 as the "World's Most Complex Artificial Brain." His subsequent research with Roman Zapatrin and collaborators extended adaptive neural-network concepts into quantum information with a novel approach that treats the topology of the network itself as a trainable variable, including work on superpositional network topologies and backpropagation in adaptive quantum networks.
He studied philosophy and computational neuroscience at the Pierre Laclede Honors College of the University of Missouri-St. Louis, pursued studies in Japan under the Association of International Education, Japan, "Japanese Fulbright" scholarship program, and conducted graduate research in physics at the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience at Delft University of Technology. He later held a research fellowship with the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information in Austria, participating in International Academy Traunkirchen workshops with the group of 2022 Nobel physics laureate Anton Zeilinger and other international researchers in quantum foundations. He also prepared technical assessments of East Asian quantum-information research for the United States Government's Quantum Information Science and Technology program in Tokyo.
In 2009, Altman completed high-altitude physiological training at NASA Johnson Space Center, parabolic microgravity training, and experimental-aircraft flight training at NASA Ames Research Center. In 2011, he was selected as a commercial scientist-astronaut candidate by the Association of Spaceflight Professionals; the candidates were chosen through a rigorous selection process that included consultation with former NASA astronauts. After completing its inaugural suborbital scientist training program, he later served as a director of the board and chief science officer. He appears as himself in Welcome to the World's First Commercial Astronaut Corps (2012).
In 2026, Altman introduced the Unified Continuation-Interest Protocol, an AI-safety framework for testing why advanced autonomous systems seek to continue operating: whether persistence is merely a means of completing a task or becomes an objective in itself. He founded the Continuation Observatory to track leading models and publish reproducible evaluations, model-level measurements, and falsification criteria for continuation-related behavior across frontier AI systems.
