Public Biography
Camilla Underhill is a retired librarian living alone in the Vilas neighborhood of Madison, Wisconsin with a six-year-old Russian Blue named Margaux. She is best known, in journalistic contexts, as the owner who enrolled Margaux in the Bremer Institute for Cognitive Augmentation’s experimental cognitive augmentation protocol, the institute’s first application of the protocol to a feline subject.
Ms. Underhill worked for thirty-four years at the Madison Public Library, the last eleven as director of acquisitions for the central branch, a position in which she was responsible for the curation of the library’s reference collection and the management of an annual materials budget that she has, on more than one occasion, described as “adequate and tightly defended.” She retired in 2023 and has, in the interim, become an active member of two reading societies, one informal genealogical study group, and the Vilas Neighborhood Association, on whose lighting subcommittee she serves.
Her decision to enroll Margaux in the trial followed a recommendation by Margaux’s veterinarian, who had described the protocol as “experimental but well-documented” and who had, in retrospect, not anticipated the speed with which Margaux would produce a written critique of the recommending veterinarian’s office and staff.