Tim O'Donnell

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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. This 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.