Hi, I’m Tim. I’m a biologist and machine learning researcher. I work at Open Athena, a nonprofit developing open AI models for science. I’m currently working on MarinFold, where we are training a language model to predict protein structure from sequence alone. Last year, I worked on BoltzGen, a protein design model.
Much of my career has centered on the immune system and cancer. At Mount Sinai in NYC, I spent a few years as a senior scientist at the Tisch Cancer Institute. Along with Alex Rubinsteyn and Julia Kodysh, I launched an initiative called OpenVax to create an open bioinformatics platform for personalized cancer vaccines. We deployed our software in four Phase I trials led by Nina Bhardwaj. I also did a PhD at Mount Sinai with Uri Laserson. My dissertation introduced new methods for T cell epitope prediction, which we implemented in the MHCflurry package. This grew out of earlier work in Jeff Hammerbacher’s group. After Mount Sinai, I worked at Imprint, a focused research organization that is trying to decode immune receptor repertoires. I also spent two years consulting for biotech companies on machine learning.
At the start of my career, I built analysis software for molecular dynamics simulations at D.E. Shaw Research and worked as a software engineer at several web startups. 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.