Neuroscientist, robotics leader, pianist and big-mountain skier.
Gunnar builds machines that work well with people. He is Technical Director at Kickmaker, where he helps hardware companies, from humanoid robots to wearables, get from prototype to production. He lives in Truckee, California.
Gunnar is a big-mountain skier at home on the steep, exposed lines of Squaw Valley, now Palisades Tahoe. His launch off Bowers' Tower, a drop of more than 100 feet, is the photo on the cover of the second edition of Robb Gaffney's Squallywood, the guidebook Tahoe skiers call the bible of Squaw's most exposed lines. The photo is by Jason Abraham.
The Ski Journal ran another shot of him from the early 2000s, airing off the side of The Chimney, and noted that his jumps are calculated. That fits: he reads a line the way he designs an experiment. His standing invitation is simple: let's go ski.
Gunnar earned his PhD in cellular and molecular neuroscience at the University of Nevada, Reno in 2011, and stayed on as a research scientist and lab manager until 2015. He built a neuroscience lab from scratch, led teams of up to a dozen researchers, and published work on how nerves find their way during development, with implications for nerve regeneration. That research led him to a unified theory of how the brain learns, one that challenges the textbook account of reward and punishment.
He has spent the decade since putting that theory into machines. He founded Brain2Bot in Reno to build robot companions that learn in real time and respond with emotion. He taught biology and neuroscience as a visiting professor at the University of St. Thomas, then led product work on autonomous delivery vehicles at Gatik, vehicle perception at BlueSpace.ai and laboratory robots at Hamilton Company. He co-wrote Artificial General Intelligence: A Revolution Beyond Deep Learning and the Human Brain with Brent Oster, advises ORBAI, and writes about AI and people on his Substack. Today he is Technical Director at Kickmaker.
In March 2026 he spoke on AI in robotics at the Ops & Finance Foundation's AI in Society roundtable at the University of Nevada, Reno, Lake Tahoe.
Before the lab, there was the piano. Gunnar graduated from The College of Idaho with a bachelor's degree in biology and piano performance, with Gipson Honors, and went on to perform as a concert pianist. He likes to point out that a former concert pianist who also skis extreme terrain is a rare combination. The discipline of the practice room shows up in everything else he does.