R. Michael Perry, Ph.D. is Patient Caretaker at Alcor. He was hired by Alcor in 1989 following two years of volunteer work at the Foundation. He monitors Alcor’s dewars, provides facility surveillance during off-work hours, and performs writing tasks and computer programming. He has authored or contributed to the automated cooldown and perfusion modeling programs and has maintained the patient log books for many years. He is a regular contributor to Alcor newsletters. He has been a member of Alcor since 1984.

Prior to working at Alcor, Mike worked as a computer programmer — from 1968 until 1987. He graduated from the University of Chicago in 1969 with a B.S. in Mathematics. He earned a M.S. in Computer Science from Colorado University in 1979 and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the same institution in 1984.

Mike is a Director and an ordained minister of the Society for Venturism and performs wedding ceremonies and memorial services for this IRS-recognized, scientific and religious organization. He is also a cofounder and currently president of the Society for Universal Immortalism, a group dedicated to the hope that all persons who ever lived will eventually be resurrected through scientific means.

He has authored two books: Toward Self-Optimization of Machine Intelligence (Ph.D. Thesis) and Forever for All: Moral Philosophy, Cryonics, and the Scientific Prospects for Immortality. Prior to his Alcor experience, Mike authored or coauthored several journal papers and technical reports on computerized tomography, for applications ranging from medicine to solar physics.

Mike authored Suspension Failures: Lessons from the Early Years, and coauthored On Determining the Electron Density Distribution of the Solar Corona from K-Coronameter Data, Improved Three-Dimensional Mapping of the Electron Density Distribution of the Solar Corona, Computerized Multi-Angular Tomography, Software Aid for Optimizing 0–1 Matrices, and The Anti-Death Philosophy Of NF Fedorov.