OpenAthena Website Development

Open Athena, a nonprofit founded by ex-Apple, Meta, and Two Sigma engineers, set out with an ambitious mission: to help academic labs build domain-specific foundation models for science. Despite their deep technical bench, they lacked the visibility and outreach to the researchers they were serving; thus, they needed a modern, high-trust website that could:

Communicate a credible, forward-thinking identity to researchers and funders

Explain a complex offering in simple, actionable terms

Build trust through clarity, polish, and performance

They approached me with a clean slate: no brand system, no content structure, and a tight timeline.

I worked closely with Open Athena’s founding team to design and build a fast, elegant website that communicates their mission and value to a technical and academic audience. Using WordPress and GSAP, I created a responsive, lightweight frontend with a clean content structure and subtle animations that reflect the brand’s modern, research-driven ethos. I focused on performance, accessibility, and SEO best practices to ensure the site loads quickly, ranks well, and grows with their evolving needs—all delivered within a tight, three-week timeline.

Here are some of the deliverables.