Who am I, anyway?

Some things I've done

I did my undergrad at UChicago in biology, but I tried to take as many courses in other fields as possible. This ended up including Nazca ceramics, science podcasting, Mayan body modifications, exoplanets, African history, Bayesian epistemology, food science, and paleoanthropology.

Back in '22, I trained a diffusion model on perturb-Seq data for a summer fellowship. I didn't document it very well (oops) but this was the first virtual cell, or one of the first.1

I was also at Ginkgo (as a Co-Op). My task was to optimize a gene shuffling protocol, and I managed to compress it from roughly a week to a few hours.

At Baobab, my job is to do whatever has to be done. I've developed a transformation protocol for a nonmodel organism, built new bioinformatics algorithms, devised new mechanistic interpretability methods, and trained a bunch of different foundation models from scratch.

Some things I like

Deep learning

My love affair with deep learning began in 2017, when I encountered the astonishing InfoGAN and StackGAN papers. It felt obvious that generative AI would change everything, so I threw myself into the math.

The benefits of a long acquaintance with the field (relative to the post-ChatGPT multitude, at least) include a quicker instinct for the value of an idea and a deeper mental index of papers. If either of these might be helpful to you, please reach out!

Senegal

Senegal is one of the best arguments for travel I can think of.

- Anthony Bourdain

I studied abroad in Senegal and returned home with an affliction: I cannot stop yapping about it. Dakar is one of my favorite places on Earth.

To answer a common question: yes, the baobab tree grows everywhere in Senegal, and that is largely why I named my company Baobab. But mostly I'm trolling Ginkgo.

Cooking

I love cooking! Usually I'll read a number of recipes and riff on them; if I am following a recipe, I'm probably cooking Sichuanese food.2

I also often cook Senegalese food: no cuisine achieves a comparable balance of taste, scalability, nutrition, and cost. A few dozen dollars of ingredients for maafe, and you're fed for a week or more.3 I highly recommend Pierre Thiam's cookbooks if you're looking to get into it.

Long walks

I'm an avid flâneur. For the generation and refinement of ideas, for serendipity, and for joy, there can be no substitute for a long walk.

Motto

Good ideas are surprising in advance but obvious in retrospect.

Am I a Rat?

If you're unfamiliar with the term: not a rodent, a Rationalist. Perhaps you encountered this site through a LessWrong crosspost, or met me at a Rat meetup.

I think there's a lot to admire about the Rats. LessWrong is a saner place to doomscroll than most. Their events usually have an abundance of interesting people. I also think some non-Rat beliefs are loony, like a confident and mundane upper bound for the impacts of AI.

That said, I broadly sympathize with criticisms of the Rats. They take care to avoid every fallacy but the making shit up fallacy, which is when you make shit up. Usually this is not out of deception or malice, but a belief (or norm) that raw intellection can substitute for poor research.4

There are related, darker currents in that community as well. I want to state my thoughts here explicitly:

Do not lump me in with the race science people. Again: never lump me in with racist bozos!

About this website

This website uses the Pelican static site generator and a custom theme, with one guiding rule: legibility, legibility, legibility!

To that end, the text column's width is kept narrow. The 🄰 button in the top left lets you swap between two highly readable fonts: Lora and Atkinson Hyperlegible Next.

If you want to make your website more legible, I strongly recommend reading Butterick's Practical Typography.

  1. Defining a "virtual cell" to be a generative model trained at large scale on single-cell data with the explicit goal of modeling perturbations, which appears to me to be the standard usage. For other definitions of the term, mine was not the first. ↩︎

  2. People tell me that my ethnicity is hard to guess from my appearance. I'm wasian: equal parts Chinese, Welsh, Dutch, and Ashkenazi Jewish. ↩︎

  3. Is maafe Senegalese? You could say so, at least if no Malians are in earshot. ↩︎

  4. Granted, they have less of this and better norms around it than the vast majority of communities; the failure is more sporadic and aesthetic than ubiquitous and structural. The downside of having principles is that you can be credibly accused of hypocrisy. ↩︎