Who am I, anyway?

Some things I've done

I did my undergrad at UChicago in biology (‘24), 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 (guh) 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 create a better gene shuffling protocol, and I managed to compress it from roughly a week to a few hours.

At Baobab, my job as founder was to do whatever had to be done. I:

• Set the company up with a wet lab.

• Developed a transformation protocol for a nonmodel organism.

• Created some new bioinformatics algorithms.

• Devised novel mechanistic interpretability methods.

• Trained a bunch of different foundation models, some with new and hard-to-train architectures, from scratch.

• Managed a small team working on our projects.

I also helped Syntis Bio get set up with AI. I’m happy to report that standardizing the company on Claude Code with a company-wide monorepo and a detailed CLAUDE.md worked spectacularly. K.I.S.S.!

Baobab is on hold; I’m exploring new options and considering a pivot to AI safety.

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.

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 cook Senegalese food: no other cuisine balances taste, scalability, nutrition, and cost so well. 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 a flâneur if ever there was one.

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 Lighthaven.

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 (though this is going out of fashion).

That said, I broadly sympathize with criticisms of the community. 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!

Website Layout

Butterick's Practical Typography strongly influenced the design of this website. I can’t recommend it enough.

Contact

The best way to reach me is email: [email protected]. I’m also on GitHub and LinkedIn.