I build self-improving agents that do real work.

I recently finished my Ph.D. in Computer Science at Yale University, advised by Mark Gerstein.

I work with Arman Cohan as my advisor of record, and closely with Smita Krishnaswamy. I earned my master's from Yale CS with the late Dragomir Radev, and have been a graduate affiliate at Grace Hopper College since 2021.

My research turns LLMs into agents that reason, code, and collaborate. Three threads:

  • Self-improving reasoning: memory [R.3], self-updating [S.14], and hierarchical refinement [R.5] that let LLMs sustain expert-level, multi-step reasoning in chemistry and biology.
  • Agents that collaborate: how specialized agents coordinate, debate, and converge on reliable decisions in complex biomedical settings [S.7,R.2].
  • Models that touch biology: representations for protein design [R.1], molecular reasoning [S.9], and large-scale homology search [S.13], driving discoveries that hold up in the lab [S.15].
My research is supported by Schmidt Futures.

I've also been a Research Scientist Intern at Google (contributing across DeepMind, Search, and Cloud); with earlier stints at Eigen AI, Microsoft, and Sinovation Ventures.

Now building something new.

Honors

2026   Best Paper Award · AAAI AI for Research Workshop
2025   Best Paper Runner-Up · ICML CFAgentic Workshop
2025   Yunfan “Rising Star” Award · World AI Conference (WAIC)
2024   Best Paper Award · IJCAI AI for Research Workshop
2025   Travel Grant · ICML Computer Use Agents Workshop
2025   Financial Assistance · ICLR

Recent Preprints [ + Show 4 papers ]

Discover the google scholar | semantic scholar


Selected Publications [ + Show 20 papers ]

Other Publications [ + Show 24 papers ]

Recent Talks

01/2026 Talk at Genentech Research & Early Development group (gRED).
09/2025 Talk at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
07/2025 Talk at ISMB 2025 3DSIG Section.
11/2024 Talk at Takeda Pharmaceutical.
07/2024 Talk at Yale Department of Biomedical Informatics & Data Science.
07/2024 Talk at ISMB 2024 Text Mining Section.
07/2024 Talk at Multimodal Large Language Model.
02/2024 Talk at AI in Medicine Symposium at Yale School of Medicine.
01/2024 Talk at PSB 2024 Workshop on LLMs for Biomedicine.
07/2023 Talk at ISMB/ECCB 2023 Text Mining Section.

Services

Area Chair: ACL ARR (ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, etc).
Conference Program Committee / Reviewer: NeurIPS, ICML, ACL, EMNLP, CIKM, NAACL, INLG, IEEE BigData, COLM.
Journal Reviewer: npj Digital Medicine, TPAMI, Neurocomputing, Briefings in Bioinformatics, PLOS Computational Biology, BMC Bioinformatics, PLOS ONE, Health Data Science.
Workshop Reviewer: KDD 2023 Workshop on Data Mining in Bioinformatics, ACL 2023 Workshop on Building Educational Apps, ACL 2023 Workshop on Clinical NLP, ICML 2023 Workshop on Neural Conv AI, ICML 2023 Workshop on Interpretable ML in Healthcare, NAACL-HLT 2021 Workshop on Language and Vision Research.

Undergrad Advising

For details, please visit our alumni page.

Daniel Shao (Fudan undergrad -> Yale Ph.D.)
Jiapeng Chen (Yale M.S. -> MIT EECS Ph.D.)
Andrew Tran (Yale undergrad -> founder of alkera)
Tony Li (Yale undergrad -> founder of alkera)
Rick Gao (Yale undergrad -> founder of alkera)
Jeffrey Tan (Yale undergrad -> Riot Games)
Jiakang Chen (Yale undergrad -> Jane Street)
Bill Qian (Yale undergrad -> Hudson River Trading)
Joey Tan (Yale undergrad)
Jeremy Ng (Yale undergrad -> Google)
Howard Dai (Yale undergrad)
Shiheng (Tom) Qiu (Yale undergrad)
Denny Zhang
Sivan Almogy
Yuxuan Tian
Brianna-Alexandra Stan
Nikhil Khandekar
Xinwu (Sam) Ye (Fudan M.S. -> HKU Ph.D)
Jiwoong (Andy) Sohn (Korea University M.S. -> ETH Ph.D)
Haroon Mohamedali

Misc.

I took 12 courses (& 3 additional project credits) at Yale: CPSC 523 Principles of Operating Systems, 537 Intro to Database, 539 Software Engineering, 552 Deep Learning Theory, 553 Unsupervised Learning, 569 Randomized Algorithms, 577 NLP, 583 Deep Learning on Graph, 668 Blockchain Research, 677 Adv NLP, 680 Trustworthy Deep Learning, 752 Biomedical Data Sci.
Interestingly, this course load matches the requirement for a B.S. degree in Computer Science (which requires 11 courses + 1 project credit) and exceeds what's needed for a B.A. (9 courses + 1 project credit).