Tim O'Donnell

About / Email  /  GitHub  /  Google Scholar  /  Bluesky  

I’m an immunologist and software engineer. I currently work at Open Athena, a non-profit that helps academic groups develop large machine learning models. I also occasionally work with biotechs as a technical consultant.

Prior to joining Open Athena, I spent a year at Imprint, a focused research organization that is working to decode disease information from immune receptor repertoires.

From 2014-2022, I worked at Mount Sinai in a few capacities:

• I was most recently a senior scientist at the Tisch Cancer Institute, where I worked with Nina Bhardwaj’s group on personalized cancer vaccines. We ultimately launched four Phase I clinical trials to evaluate our platform.
• From 2017-2020, I did PhD with Uri Laserson in immunology. My dissertation introduced new methods for T cell epitope prediction, which are implemented in the MHCflurry package. I also did some work on antibody responses using phage immunoprecipitation sequencing (PhIP-seq).
• I helped launch the OpenVax project to develop open source tools for designing cancer vaccines. The OpenVax tools have seen wide adoption by research groups and companies worldwide.
• OpenVax grew out of earlier work with Jeff Hammerbacher at Mount Sinai (2014-2017).

Prior to Mount Sinai, I worked at D.E. Shaw Research (2009-2014) on analysis software for molecular dynamics simulations. Before that, I worked as a software engineer, helped put together engineering teams for two startups, and spent a summer interning at Google.

I hold a B.S. in Math & Computer Science from Brown University and a PhD in Immunology from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

Page design thanks to Leonid Keselman's adaptation of Jon Barron's website.