About this site

I'm Emma Junqua, a machine learning engineer pointing my skills at animal welfare.

I came to this work through the animals in my own home. My husband Sam and I foster kittens—usually the ones most at risk of being put down—and somewhere between the 2am feedings and the spreadsheet I kept of their weights, it stopped feeling like a hobby and started feeling like a question: why isn't more of the technology I work with every day pointed at this?

Animal shelters and rescues generate enormous amounts of data—intake records, medical notes, adoption outcomes, foster logs—and very little of it becomes decisions that save lives. The gap isn't a lack of compassion, or even a lack of data. It's that the people holding the data and the people who can model it rarely sit at the same table. I'd like to help close that gap, starting with shelters and following the thread wherever it leads—into the harder, longer-term questions about minds, sentience, and the welfare of animals we don't yet know how to help.

Background

I studied Data Science at UC Berkeley (B.A.) and Computational Science & Engineering at Harvard (M.E.), and I've spent my career working as a machine learning engineer. More recently I was a fellow in the AI×Animals Sentient Futures Fellowship, which sharpened my sense of where machine learning can do the most good for nonhuman animals—and where it can quietly do harm.

What you'll find here

This is a notebook on animals, minds, and machines, written from an engineer's perspective. Expect build-in-public technical posts (things I've made, or want to make, for shelters), honest takes on where AI genuinely helps versus where it's hype, field guides to the data and tools, and interviews with people doing the work. I try to be specific, useful, and clear about the limits.

Get in touch

If you run a shelter or rescue, work in animal welfare, or you're a technologist wondering whether your skills could matter here, I'd love to hear from you. Reach me at @emmajunqua.