Damon Binder

Damon Binder was born in 1997 in Brisbane, Australia. His father was a respiratory physician; his mother a general practitioner who left practice to raise children. The family was nominally Catholic, of mixed Italian and Austrian descent, but Mass attendance tapered off early and Damon stopped believing before he finished primary school.

The family moved several times before settling in Townsville. It was a coastal city in the dry tropics, where a week of monsoonal downpours might be followed by year without rain. Damon enjoyed eating mangos and hiding in air-conditioning during the humid summers.

He had one older sister and two younger ones, who he liked to tease. He once tricked his middle sister into eating wasabi by claiming it was ice cream, and the younger into trading her (small, brown) $2 coin for a (much bigger, shinier) 50c coin. All four children conspired to maintain that the youngest believed in Santa Claus in order to keep receiving extra presents.

Damon’s first obsession was Thomas the Tank Engine. When he heard the show’s theme music he would run to the TV and stand stiffly to attention. He was deeply upset when his older sister told him the Island of Sodor wasn’t a real place.

As he grew older, he became fascinated by dinosaurs and outer space. He also developed an empirical bent. He stuck a knife in the toaster to see if the heating coil would make it glow, and got a shock. He tested whether the stove remained hot after the pot was removed by sticking his whole hand on. A dead patch on the lawn led to stern words from his father, and a ban on further experiments.

He attended Townsville Grammar School. His favourite subject was mathematics, and he did math problems in other classes when he was supposed to be doing something else. He debated, had minor roles in school productions, and played the piano somewhat competently but with poor rhythm. In high school he found a wallaby carcass in the bush and excavated the bones; his father helped him mount the skeleton.

He graduated at sixteen, and moved to Canberra to study physics and mathematics at the Australian National University. Canberra was colder than Townsville; he had to buy long-sleeved clothes for the winter. He lived at Bruce Hall for all three years. The college was catered, and he ate meals in the dining hall and talked with whoever sat nearby. He borrowed so many books from the library that he returned them each semester with a suitcase. In his final year he met Abigail on her first day of college. He decided to wait at least a month before asking her out, but after a week she had forced the issue.

After graduating university he spent a semester teaching, and then spent the earnings travelling through Eastern Europe before starting his physics PhD at Princeton. Abigail was still studying in Canberra, but they video-chatted every day and visited each other during the holidays. He liked blackboarding with his fellow theorists and trivia nights at the graduate bar.

During his PhD he began reading more about existential risks, and thinking about what to work on after physics. When the COVID-19 pandemic began, he left Princeton and moved back to Canberra to live with Abigail. He soon took a job at the Future of Humanity Institute in Oxford, graduating remotely over Zoom.

Before leaving Canberra again, he proposed to Abigail. They were long-distance for another year before she moved to London in 2022. On weekends they took trains to old cathedrals and rambled through the countryside. They liked how the local pubs were marked on the trail maps. They married in the middle of the year, back in Australia. Damon came down with COVID-19 at the wedding, and spent the first week of married life isolating in his sister’s apartment.

At the end of that year Damon took a job at Open Philanthropy (now Coefficient Giving), on the biosecurity team. They moved to Jersey City so that Abigail could work in Manhattan, while Damon occasionally commutes to Washington DC. On a typical day, he works, runs, cooks, reads non-fiction, and goes to sleep. He’s been trying to cook every extant ancient Roman recipe; Abigail supports him by brewing passum. As of early 2026, he’s been working on a side project with Claude Code to randomly simulate ‘typical’ lives.