Episode 18: Research Data Science in Biotech

Vanishing Gradients

Hugo speaks with Eric Ma about Research Data Science in Biotech. Eric leads the Research team in the Data Science and Artificial Intelligence group at Moderna Therapeutics. Prior to that, he was part of a special ops data science team at the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research's Informatics department.

In this episode, Hugo and Eric talk about

• What tools and techniques they use for drug discovery (such as mRNA vaccines and medicines);
• The importance of machine learning, deep learning, and Bayesian inference;
• How to think more generally about such high-dimensional, multi-objective optimization problems;
• The importance of open-source software and Python;
• Institutional and cultural questions, including hiring and the trade-offs between being an individual contributor and a manager;
• How they’re approaching accelerating discovery science to the speed of thought using computation, data science, statistics, and ML.

And as always, much, much more!

LINKS

• Eric's website
• Eric on twitter
• Vanishing Gradients on YouTube
• Cell Biology by the Numbers by Ron Milo and Rob Phillips
• Eric's JAX tutorials at PyCon and SciPy
• Eric's blog post on Hiring data scientists at Moderna!