Public Biography
Dr. Marvin Krieg is the director of the Bremer Institute for Cognitive Augmentation in Madison, Wisconsin, and the lead investigator on the institute’s Augmented Mammalian Cognition Protocol. He has held the position since 2017, following the resignation of his predecessor over what was, at the time, described in the institute’s annual report as “a disagreement of scope.”
Dr. Krieg holds a Ph.D. in neuropharmacology from Johns Hopkins University, where his dissertation concerned the modulation of prefrontal dopamine receptors in non-human primates. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen and held a research appointment at the University of Wisconsin–Madison from 2009 until his move to the Bremer Institute. He has authored or co-authored ninety-three peer-reviewed publications, the most cited of which is a 2018 paper proposing that the species-specific upper bound on mammalian cognition is “less a hard ceiling than a soft tradition.”
He is the principal author of the 2024 Journal of Comparative Neurocognition paper that characterized the institute’s macaque trials as having produced “mixed and largely litigious” results, a phrase that has since been adopted by several other research groups for use in their own reports.
In May 2026, he conducted the first canine application of the institute’s protocol on a basset hound named Walter, who issued a formal request for the procedure’s reversal within the hour. Dr. Krieg, at a press briefing the same evening, described the outcome as “the one we were preparing for, simply much earlier in the timeline.”