Professional profile
Senior technology leader with 10+ years across venture-backed biotech and academic medicine. I build reproducible AI and analytics platforms used in biomedical research and biopharma decision-making. Co-founder and CTO of Via Scientific (Cambridge, MA). Associate Professor at UMass Chan Medical School. Author or co-author of widely used open-source tools including I-TASSER, DolphinNext, DEBrowser, GUIDEseq, and ASPeak, with 13,500+ citations across 35+ publications. First-author on DolphinNext, DEBrowser, and ASPeak; co-author on studies published in Nature, Cell, Science, Nature Protocols, Nature Communications, and Nature Structural and Molecular Biology.
Professional experience
Co-founder & Chief Technology Officer
Via Scientific, Inc., Cambridge, MA
2023 to Present
Lead technology strategy, architecture, and engineering for Via Foundry, the multi-omics and AI analytics platform commercialized from UMass Chan. Venture-backed, with institutional investors and advisors from pharma and enterprise AI.
- Defined the AI/ML platform strategy across data ingestion, pipeline orchestration, model training, deployment, and drift monitoring. The reference architecture from that work is what the team ships against today.
- Recruited and led a cross-functional team of AI engineers, software engineers, and computational scientists; shaped technical standards, the hiring bar, and roadmap cadence.
- Evaluated and integrated third-party AI solutions (LLM providers, vector stores, agent frameworks, cloud AI services) against in-house builds on technical, regulatory, and security merit.
- Owned reliability, reproducibility, and security for a customer-facing platform supporting regulated biomedical workflows; versioned, auditable pipelines by design.
- Partnered with investors and advisors (Melissa J. Moore, former CSO of Moderna; Rob Hickey, former EVP Engineering at DataRobot; Shah Nawaz, former VP Digital Transformation at Regeneron) on platform strategy and business execution.
Associate Professor, Program in Molecular Medicine
UMass Chan Medical School, Worcester, MA
2020 to Present
Faculty in the Program in Molecular Medicine and Department of Genomics and Computational Biology. Research on AI for multi-omics, reproducible analytics, and RNA therapeutics.
- Co-directed the UMass Chan Bioinformatics Core supporting 80+ labs and 240+ scientists; set standards for reproducibility, usability, and reliability across institutional workflows.
- Delivered institution-scale platforms (DolphinNext, DEBrowser, GUIDEseq) that became shared infrastructure and the technical basis for Via Foundry.
- Published as senior author on DolphinNext (BMC Genomics, 2020) and on the ABRF Functional Annotation Routines paper (J. Biomolecular Techniques, 2023).
- Designed and led NGS and bioinformatics training programs and bootcamps that scaled institutional capability.
- Invited speaker, session chair, and reviewer across ABRF, Nextflow, OSU RNA Biology, and editorial panels including BMC Genomics.
Assistant Professor & Bioinformatics Core Lead
UMass Chan Medical School · Worcester, MA
Feb 2015 to 2020
Promoted into the faculty track. Designed and built the NGS analytics stack that later became Via Foundry; standardized RNA-Seq, scRNA-Seq, ChIP-Seq, ATAC-Seq, and GATK variant-calling pipelines, and established reproducibility practices across the institution.
Bioinformatician III
UMass Chan Medical School · Bioinformatics Core · Worcester, MA
Jun 2013 to Jan 2015
Built the reusable pipeline platform and training programs at the Bioinformatics Core that supported hundreds of concurrent researchers across UMass Medical School.
- Designed and implemented reusable, robust, production-grade bioinformatics pipelines for NGS, microarray, genomics, proteomics, and chemogenomics data supporting hundreds of concurrent users.
- Integrated computational methods and pipelines with high-performance computing clusters; designed hardware configurations to optimize software performance and scalability.
- Partnered directly with PIs on research projects, including scoping the collaboration, researching the underlying science, implementing the appropriate bioinformatics solutions, and delivering to project timelines.
- Installed, maintained, and configured sequencing data analysis interfaces and portals including Galaxy, GenePattern, and Genome Space for the UMass Medical School community.
- Developed rapid prototypes, custom scripts, and novel algorithms with integrated visualization applications where existing software packages were not available or adequate.
- Built custom databases and web portals for managing raw and processed experimental data.
- Documented computational analysis procedures and authored summary reports suitable for inclusion in manuscripts and grant applications.
- Led bioinformatics training and workshops for analysis pipelines and in-house software applications; coordinated with biostatisticians, IT, and interdepartmental project teams.
- Participated in oral presentation of project findings and abstracts, including periodic project status meetings and final project deliverables.
Bioinformatician
UMass Chan Medical School · Moore and Zamore Labs · Worcester, MA
Aug 2009 to Jun 2013
Worked on post-transcriptional gene regulation in eukaryotes via RNA mechanisms under the supervision of Prof. Melissa J. Moore and Prof. Phillip D. Zamore. Built the NGS software and algorithms that later became DolphinNext, DEBrowser, and ASPeak.
- Developed bioinformatics software to analyze data from SOLEXA and SOLiD next-generation sequencing platforms, including analysis and visualization tooling.
- Designed algorithms to eliminate noise in sequencing data and call peaks robustly; accounted for noise sources including experimental method and genome-mapability bias. Foundational work for ASPeak (Bioinformatics, 2013).
- Engineered custom per-project user interfaces so scientists could easily reach, summarize, analyze, and visualize data with different algorithms and approaches.
- Installed and maintained UCSC Genome Browser mirrors; built data-conversion pipelines for UCSC and Galaxy formats (wiggle plots, BED, SNP visualization and analysis).
- Developed pattern-search algorithms using machine-learning methods.
Postdoctoral Fellow, Computational Structural Biology
University of Kansas · Yang Zhang Lab · Lawrence, KS
2008 to 2009
Co-developed I-TASSER, the unified platform for automated protein structure and function prediction. Co-author on the Nature Protocols (2010) method paper, cited 7,800+ times and still a reference in computational structural biology and early drug-design workflows.
Technical stack
AI / LLMs
Claude · Claude Code · GPT · Gemini · Vertex · Llama · Generative AI · Agentic workflows · Machine Learning · Deep Learning
ML frameworks
PyTorch · scikit-learn · MLflow · Hugging Face · LangChain
Developer tooling
CLI · SDK · MCP server development · VSCode extension · Claude Code plugin development
Languages & data
Python · Perl · R · Shiny · SQL · TypeScript · Node.js · Pandas · Nextflow · Snakemake · Prisma · PostgreSQL · MongoDB · Zarr · TileDB
Infrastructure
Linux · AWS · Azure OpenAI · Databricks · Docker · Kubernetes · Apache · Nginx
Delivery
Agile / SDLC · JIRA · Confluence · GitHub · CI/CD · MLOps
Collaboration & UX
UX/UI sensibility · executive stakeholder communication