Building scientific intelligence. past: founding team @cellaritybio, ML researcher @Cornell, investor @pillar_vc, advisor @nucleateHQ
Joined April 2011
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Michael Retchin retweeted
Co-hosting a dinner with @kenbwork next Tue (10/27) for folks doing research at the intersection of AI × Bio!
Wish list for topic distribution: gLMs & seq2func, regulatory variant-to-gene mapping, de novo protein/RNA design, AI-guided experimental design & benchmarking models on practical scientific work
Would love to meet more people actively working on these! Reg: luma.com/e0r8ayqp
Michael Retchin retweeted
Hiring for Members of Technical Staff to work on rigorous evaluation of AI in biology.
Our mission is to advance humanity's ability to engineer biology. We approach this by understanding and improving AI’s application to biology across basic research, drug discovery, and biosecurity. We are a team of engineers, scientists, and operations specialists who are driven by improving capabilities and interpretability. Some of our work is showcased on benchmarks.bio.
About this role
You’ll turn your understanding of a biological domain into a roadmap of benchmarks and design them with engineers. Then build and manage your own scientific team using your network and internal talent infrastructure.
You have
(1) deep scientific expertise and experience using AI tools
(2) or strong coursework in math/CS and experience working with scientists
This is a high-intensity, founder-type role. Our Members of Technical Staff have built companies, run drug programs and scaled complex technical projects.
Projects you might work on
- Design benchmarks with engineers and scientists, from selecting scientific questions and datasets to developing reliable graders.
- Work with engineers on large-scale computing and AI inference infrastructure to evaluate models and investigate their failures.
- Research new methods for evaluating scientific capabilities and measuring improvements from training.
- Work with our internal data generation and drug development teams to build tasks around real experiments and research decisions.
How we work
Our MTS team works in person in Mission Bay, San Francisco. We keep meetings to a minimum and are flexible about when you arrive or leave. Tight deadlines and customer commitments sometimes require late hours.
Our work in use
Frontier AI labs use our benchmarks to assess biological capabilities and safeguards. Our work appears in research announcements and model cards, including:
- anthropic.com/claude-fable-5…
- anthropic.com/claude-opus-5-…
- anthropic.com/news/healthcar…
- media.x.ai/v1/website/card4p…
- x.ai/news/biosafety-at-the-f…
Hiring Process
Our process is typically completed within two weeks.
- Round 1: Introduction
- Round 2: Technical project matching
- Round 3: Take-home evaluation project (~2 hours)
- Round 4: Technical interview / live engineering session (1 hour)
- Round 5: Paid onsite project and presentation (2–3 days) - Offer
Compensation & Benefits
- 350K-500K+ OTE
- Equity
- Unlimited PTO
- Health, dental and vision insurance fully covered
- Visa sponsorship and relocation assistance
- 401(k)
- Office in Mission Bay, San Francisco
- Lunch and dinner provided
Apply at jobs.ashbyhq.com/latchbio/9b…. Or send an email to kenny[at]latch[dot]bio
Michael Retchin retweeted
we're recruiting a leader for our RNA process & production team @newlimit
this role will have an impact on all the products in our portfolio. you'll explore frontier chemistry, train and lead talented scientists, & shepherd products to the clinic.
DM me if you're interested!
Michael Retchin retweeted
Excited to introduce Onyx and announce our $8M seed round led by Dimension to build a virtual immune system!
Onyx has always been a story of connection. The first connection was to my cofounder @amlakhan, a deeply curious technologist who I’ve been fortunate to call a friend for 19 years now. I've always said that working together was a cornerstone of starting Onyx, and it truly has been one of the best decisions I've ever made.
Connection is also at the heart of what Onyx does. We believe AI is key to making biological complexity tractable, ultimately transforming life sciences into an engineering discipline. But that requires the right data. AI performance compounds with context, and richer biological context comes from more connected data.
In biology, such context is often missing: molecular data, clinical history, and change over time are typically captured in isolated fragments. Onyx provides the substrate that connects them, pairing genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics with rich clinical histories. By studying these layers together in people over time, our data platform traces how real human biology changes in response to infection, inflammation, and treatment. Seeing how these trajectories differ across people brings us closer to understanding what drives disease—and to developing precision medicines that work better for real people.
Yet connecting data is only possible because of the people who have connected with our mission. Nearly a thousand members have already joined our research studies. They are more than research participants: they are difference-makers transforming how we understand some of humanity’s most complex and chronic diseases. I always say that our work is for people, but the truth is that people make our work possible. That connection comes full circle, and at Onyx, people will always come first.
Finally, as we raised our oversubscribed round, we sought more than just business partners. We wanted investors we felt a true connection to—not merely sources of capital, but co-conspirators in creating meaningful change. To that end, we feel incredibly fortunate to have joined forces with @_DimensionCap, @haystackvc, @refactor, @standard_vc, @robotventures, and many more.
Now back to building!
Today we're introducing Onyx, a research collective building a virtual immune system: a model of how real people respond to infection, inflammation, and treatment.
We're launching with an $8M seed round led by Dimension Capital.
onyx.bio/news/introducing-on…
Michael Retchin retweeted
A hallucinating AI can be caught.
What happens when AI gives us answers that are useful enough that we stop asking whether the questions, hypotheses and representations are themselves appropriate?
Is AI fostering illusions of understanding ?
Some AI applications, such as predicting peptide fragmentations, are an unequivocal success: They're useful and highly reliable. I believe we can substantially expand the scope of such successful applications.
But the authors of this perspective raise questions about AI solutions exploiting our cognitive limitations, making us vulnerable to illusions of understanding.
Such illusions obscure the scientific community’s ability to see the formation of scientific monocultures, in which some types of methods, questions and viewpoints come to dominate alternative approaches, making science less innovative and more vulnerable to errors.
What systematic approaches can help us avoid such monocultures?
Michael Retchin retweeted
Looking forward to: “can an a computer scientist align an LLM”
The long awaited sequel to “can a biologist fix a radio”
cell.com/fulltext/S1535-6108…
Michael Retchin retweeted
We are approaching cyber-superintelligence.
But our systems aren't ready. We must secure our model weights and infrastructure against three new threats: sabotage, escape, and theft.
There is a way forward.
Secure Acceleration:
A Cyberdefense Strategy for Superintelligence
Michael Retchin retweeted
We're launching 30B-scale virtual screening at Rowan today in partnership with @onepot_ai.
By combining Rowan's high-throughput computational infrastructure with onepot's autonomous lab, we can go from target to experimental data in weeks, not months.
Michael Retchin retweeted
More capable models will introduce increased biological risk. The magnitude is fiercely debated, the direction is not.
We need more resilient biodefense.
Michael Retchin retweeted
Today, there's a strong focus on fast-follows of existing drugs. The drug programs that inspire me look different – the target is known, but we don't know how to build the drug, often requiring the dev of new tech that paves the path for more drugs.
Michael Retchin retweeted
.@newlimit is hosting a dinner in boston on sept 24 to connect with talented scientists & engineers
we promise an evening of surprising conversations, good food, & better company
let us know if you or a friend are interested in joining!
newlimit.notion.site/3cf10a8…
Michael Retchin retweeted
We're launching a program to get free or heavily discounted Claude usage to scientists, through Claude Teams for Science.
If you're a student or researcher in academia or a non profit org, ask your PI to apply. We're starting with 10,000 seats and will expand from there.
Starting today, 10,000 scientists across every field, from math to chemistry to physics and more, can get Claude through our new Claude Team plan for scientists. Standard seats are free, and premium seats with 5x usage limits are $15 per month, an 80% discount, for one year.
Claude is becoming increasingly capable of scientific work, with recent progress on problems from advanced physics calculations to protein design. Alongside that progress, we've been investing in the research community: Claude Science launched in June, and our AI for Science program funds high-impact projects with free credits. Today's expansion builds on both.
Principal investigators (or equivalent) at academic and nonprofit research institutions can sign up, then add the researchers in their group. Over the coming months, we plan to extend the program well beyond the initial 10,000 seats.
Learn more: claude.com/programs/team-pla…
Michael Retchin retweeted
The OpenAI Foundation (@FoundationOAI) is now hiring 20+ people (4 roles in the life-sciences team!)
If you are excited about our mission to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity, I would love for you to apply or share this link with someone talented: openaifoundation.org/careers…
Michael Retchin retweeted
Thrilled to post thread re: new single-cell lineage of mouse embryo reconstructed w/ DNA Typewriter. One animal, zygote to late organogenesis (E13.5). Tree has 1,340,794 transcriptionally profiled, annotated tips (cells), 1,142,588 dated internal nodes, rooted at zygote
1/n
Michael Retchin retweeted
Today, we're opening a call for applications focused on rare genetic diseases. This program has a track for scientists doing basic research, and another for early-stage biotechs.
Accepted applicants will receive $50K in Claude credits over six months and join a community of researchers using AI to go after rare diseases.
We're accepting applications through August 2. – at Hoboken, NJ
We're offering grants of up to $50,000 in Claude usage credits to researchers accelerating cures for rare diseases.
This is our first focused call within AI for Science, our program supporting scientists using Claude to speed up discovery. anthropic.com/news/rare-dise…
Michael Retchin retweeted
Apply here for our Computational Research Scientist position and work with us @AnthropicAI on making fundamental biological discoveries: – at Manhattan, NY
Another job posting for a computational role in our research group focused on making fundamental discoveries in biology:
job-boards.greenhouse.io/ant…
Michael Retchin retweeted
Today, we’re launching @TuvaAI to build a human-centric future for agentic science.
Humans collaborating with AI can learn more than either working alone: humans guiding the research, equipped with agents that can test ideas quickly and autonomously, will deliver the next wave of scientific discovery. But science is all about the details. Neither Einstein nor AGI can drive your project forward without intimately understanding your growing, interrelated web of hypotheses, intermediate results, working threads, failed experiments, datasets, notes, and water cooler conversations.
Our first product, Rao, was born out of my frustration having to reteach LLMs these constantly changing details for every single task in my own research. Rao maintains a persistent, dynamic research memory that learns and remembers project context, history, and threads. This research memory then links into our scientific agents as well as other AI software you may already be using, such as Claude or Codex. With Rao, every scientist turns into a PI managing a proactive, agentic research team that automatically stays on the same page.
Rao is live in VS Code and by CLI, and can help with any scientific task that can be done in a computer. Our early users include computational biologists, theoretical neuroscientists, chip designers, and polymer physicists who use Rao daily to ideate, do math, analyze data, and write papers and grants.
Now, we’re excited to announce Rao in closed beta. If your science mostly happens in a computer—theory, computational modeling, experimental data analysis, scientific writing—Rao can help you discover more, faster. Sign up for our waitlist, and if you’re a fit, we’ll work with you to tailor new, contextual agents that augment the way you do science. Link in the comments.
More personally: I’ve been doing scientific research since I was a kid. Scientists do so much for the world, choosing a painstaking career for the joy of discovery, developing technologies we use every day along the way. And yet, the tools scientists use are often cumbersome and woefully out of date. For me, Tuva is much about empowering the people of science with products they love as it is about the discoveries we’ll help them make. And I’m lucky to work with some wonderful humans along the way—@SamsaraDurvasu1 @anuvellore @KimchiOfer among many others. If our mission resonates, please reach out.
Michael Retchin retweeted
The most valuable medicines on earth, biologics, are proteins that die unless they stay within 2–8°C. Yet they cross the ocean by cargo ship, where a refrigerated container can lose power and a chokepoint like the Strait of Hormuz can wreck the whole voyage.
@Alexkesin on the cold chain keeping drugs safe at sea in Arena 008: At Sea.
