Neil Thomas

Experience

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  UC Berkeley

  May 2013 - Dec 2013

  SURF Rose Hills Experience Undergraduate Research Fellow

  • Worked with Miller Fellow Rachel Pepper in Professor Mimi Koehl's biomechanics laboratory.• Designed and implemented a novel experimental setup for testing marine larval response to linear accelerations.• Analyzed video data of marine larvae and of flow in the fluidic device.• Presented a scientific poster at the APS DFD annual meeting in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

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  UC Berkeley

  May 2014 - Dec 2014

  SURF Rose Hills Experience Undergraduate Research Fellow

  • Worked in Professor Yun S. Song's computational biology laboratory with PhD candidate Geno Guerra.• Designed and implemented a series of experiments to test the performance of a demographic inference algorithm.• Won first prize in the end-of-summer SURF student poster competition

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  23andMe

  Aug 2015 - Jun 2017

  Software Engineer

  • Implemented IBD (Identity by Descent) pipeline in Apache Spark to take advantage of data locality and parallelization. Relieved increasing backlog of customer processing.• Automated imputation pipeline using Minimac3 and Luigi. Imputed over 1 million individuals on custom reference panel with improved accuracy.• Deployed to Amazon cloud (AWS) to scale computation pipelines to handle massive customer demand.• Built haplotype phasing application using modified BEAGLE algorithm. Extracted legacy code from legacy environment. Wrote Python wrappers for research C++ code.• Responsible for collaborative project planning - distilling input from multiple teams. Interviewed candidates. Mentored and onboarded new engineers. Show less

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  University of California, Berkeley

  Jan 2017 - Jan 2022

  Graduate Student Researcher

  Developed machine learning methods for representations of proteins to enable applications in protein design, functional annotation, homology detection, and structure prediction. Published as a spotlight at NeurIPS (2019).See google scholar (https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=5qse8XgAAAAJ&hl=en) for an up-to-date list of publications

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  X, the moonshot factory

  Mar 2021 - Aug 2021

  AI Resident

  Part of an early-stage protein engineering project at the intersection of machine learning and high-throughput experimental characterization. Working to facilitate a shift towards a bioeconomy, low carbon growth and advances in human health.

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  Google

  Sept 2021 - Dec 2021

  Research Intern

  Developed an open source codebase for benchmarking protein sequence design on synthetic fitness landscapes.

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  X, the moonshot factory

  Jan 2023 - Jan 2024

  Research Scientist

  Accelerating biology moonshots with AI/ML: from protein engineering to programmable plants.

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  EvolutionaryScale

  Jan 2024 - now

  Research Scientist

  Building AI tools for biological design