Sofia Sigal-Passeck

Sofia Sigal-Passeck

Sofia
Sigal-Passeck

Hi there, I’m Sofia. I’m a biotech entrepreneur and self-proclaimed history nerd based in Rincon Hill, in the (not very sunny) city of San Francisco.

TL;DR

  • Co-founder of Uniphage and 360/Health

  • Principal Investigator at 22 with NSF funding

  • Scored 3rd in Europe and 1st in Israel in chess

  • 776 Fellow

  • Emergent Ventures (batch 17)

  • Founded what’s likely the very first biotech company in Singapore started by undergrads

  • Yale-NUS (2017 - 2021)

  • Have been to 60+ countries

  • Certified scuba diver at 11

St. Petersburg, Russia ➡️ Jerusalem ➡️ Yale-NUS College, Singapore ➡️ European nomad ➡️ New York ➡️ San Francisco ➡️ Washington, DC ➡️ Houston, TX 🙁 ➡️ San Francisco

Founder

360/Health, 2024 - until we have a fantastic exit

  • Putting all of U.S. healthcare into one free consumer app and using this unique, longitudinal anonymized data and interpretability research to create an AI superior to human doctors. Join our waitlist—something awesome is coming!

CEO of Uniphage, 2020 - 2024

  • Pioneered transformer-based models to predict viral-host interactions before the “ChatGPT boom”, 4.5 years ago, resulting in models with 99.4% accuracy for influenza strain infectivity and 89% for bacteriophage-host interactions on balanced datasets. DM if interested.

  • Got ~700k in non-dilutive funding, won a ton of competitions, and participated in *too many* accelerators.

  • My responsibilities: *everything*, from leading research to doing DCAA accounting to customer discovery. I'd love to say "never again", but I've just launched a new company. Seems like I've got a bit of an addiction!

  • Most info about Uniphage is listed elsewhere on this page.

CEO of DishUp, 2019

  • We used AI, before it was cool, to create users' taste profiles to recommend food they would enjoy.


Achievements & Such

Chess

  • 1st in Israel for girls under 16

  • 3rd in Europe for girls under 14

  • 2nd in Russia for girls under 12 

  • Champion of St. Petersburg (in respective ages) >10x

  • Won >100 other international, national, and city chess competitions, most of which only my mom remembers now

  • Became Russian Candidate Master at the age of 7


Biology

SBIR Grant from the National Science Foundation

  • Received at 22 y.o., making me one of the youngest Principal Investigators in U.S. history

  • Read more about our research here

Team Lead for National I-Corps

  • It's like a military boot camp but for customer discovery

Amgen Scholar

  • 1/15 students worldwide as a sophomore to work over the summer at a leading lab at the National University of Singapore with a ~$7,000 stipend

Stanford ADVANCE Scholar (School of Medicine)

  • Stanford connected me with the PIs and sponsored a trip to explore graduate student life there.

Synthetic Biology Fellow at Conservation X Labs

  • Selected as one of 10 fellows worldwide

  • Created a list of the top 25 most promising SynBio technologies and the top 10 ideas for future "Grand Challenges

Excellerator at Cambridge University, 2023

  • An exclusive biotech leadership summit with double digits of attendees that ran for three months and ended with a fully paid-for week at Cambridge University

  • Executives like the CEO of Genentech and the CTO of Novo Nordisk were there for discussions as speakers

GapSummit & Biotech Leader of Tomorrow at Cambridge University, 2020

  • The only undergraduate selected as one of the 100 "Biotech Leaders of Tomorrow" among students and young professionals

  • Seven months long & fully paid-for week at Cambridge

  • Won Audience’s Choice Award at the Healthcare Startup Competition


Startupy Stuff

776 Fellow, 2nd batch

  • Awarded $100k by the Reddit co-founder, Alexis Ohanian - “Thiel Fellowship for Climate”

Halcyon Fellow

  • <1% acceptance rate; non-dilutive residential accelerator in the middle of Georgetown

  • Access to non-dilutive funding, space, and other perks

  • Worked with a team of Deloitte consultants to develop Uniphage’s strategy

Stanford ASES Summit

  • 1/35 Collegiate Entrepreneurs Worldwide, 2019

  • 2nd at the Stanford Pitch Competition with our healthcare VR idea

Accelerators & Incubators - did too many during college so don’t judge too harshly

  • MassChallenge

  • Panacea Stars (Oxford University)

  • Plug&Play Agritech

  • MIT EF

  • The National University of Singapore Hangar Incubator, iGEM Venture Creation Labs (1st batch, Americas) MassChallenge + IBM, MassChallenge + Air Force, and too many others

Startup Competitions

Won…

  • Singapore and Regional Hult Priz

  • The National University of Singapore Innovation/Entrepreneurship Practicum Award

  • Audience’s Choice Award at Business Today’s NYC-based Impact Challenge

  • Tech for Good Award at the Elevating Founders Competition

  • OpenScout Startup Competition

  • Sustainability award at the Heartland Challenge Startup Competition and other competitions


Random

  • Outstanding Achievement" award from the Russian government, also known as a "gold medal", for earning perfect grades in every class in high school

  • Attended Russian and Israeli high schools at the same time and graduated at the age of 16

  • Full scholarship from the U.S. Government for a summer school in the U.S. as a high school student

  • Full scholarship from the Israeli government to study at a highly selective high school in Jerusalem 

  • Google Women Techmakers Summit Participant (2X)


Public Speaking & Judging

Speaking Engagements

Judged Startup Competitions for…

  • Conservation X Labs

  • iGEM Venture Creation Labs

  • iGEM Leuven

  • the Blue Ocean Competition, and more.


Teaching

  • Gave Biotechnology lectures for two years to 3rd-year students at the National University of Singapore

  • Was a peer tutor for two classes—Molecular Cell Biology and Biochemistry—at Yale-NUS College during junior and senior year


Research

Years of research at Uniphage are outlined elsewhere, 2020 - 2024

  • Most work outlined elsewhere

  • Also worked on determining whether phages can access plant phloem, where bacteria causing citrus greening (Candidatus Liberibacter asiaticus) and other dangerous pathogens reside, to assess if phages can be used to target them.

Capstone Project under the Supervision of Professors Cheung and Harmston, 2020 - 2021

  • Used various bioinformatic techniques to detect phages in metagenomic and genomic samples of Candidatus Liberibacter asiaticus (CLas) and related species. This helped Uniphage significantly increase our deep-learning training datasets.

SynBio Research at Prof. Matthew Chang's Lab, 2020

  • Helped increase the biosensor’s sensitivity by 1.5 fold to determine cells best at producing important intermediates for many value-added chemicals (part of the NUS-Mitsubishi Collaboration).

Amgen Scholar, 2019

  • A follow-up on my Wolbachia research that focused on determining the role of non-coding RNAs in sex determination. This bacteria literally turns genetic males into females without changing their genetic material!

Student Researcher at NUS Evolutionary Biology and Ecology Lab, 2018 - 2019

  • This independent project focused on determining whether the hormone 20-hydroxyecdysone acts as a germline determination cue that Wolbachia uses to feminize male arthropods. Unfortunately, my results indicated that this is not how Wolbachia does it :(

Other research projects

  • Aging research for one semester on C. elegans

  • Led research on plastic-digesting bacteria for iGEM

  • Limited computational biology research under Prof. Cheung

  • Planned, wrote, and partially executed a dozen other research proposals while still in college


Education

In 2021, graduated from Yale-NUS College, a highly selective and international school established by Yale University and the National University of Singapore, the top school in Asia and ranked among the top 10 globally. With only 200 students per batch and an acceptance rate of 3-7%, Yale-NUS was a unique institution. Due to its "liberal nature", the Singapore government decided to stop enrolling students. Some of my classmates were, admittedly, a bit too intense!

TL;DR of my college life

When not working on startups, I practically lived in the lab, immersed in research and reading papers. And when I wasn’t in the lab or the classroom, I

  • Played on the Yale-NUS chess team, serving as Captain at one point

  • Co-founded the Yale-NUS iGEM team

  • Co-authored the best opinion article of 2017/18 in the official college newspaper

  • Did some clinical volunteering and shadowing

  • Was deeply involved in various biotech and startup activities, which are detailed elsewhere

As if college education wasn't enough, I also…

  • Studied Financial Accounting at Rice University in 2023

And took part in the…

  • 2018 - Summer Institute at Yale that focused on Global Strategy and Leadership

  • 2018 - Summer School at the University of Pisa focused on gene expression, function analysis, genotoxicity, and ultrastructural observations. I was the only undergraduate selected to participate in this lab-based summer course

  • 2018 - Summer School in Traditional Chinese Medicine and Research Internship at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. I was the only rising sophomore selected


Hobbies

Scuba Diving 

Earned PADI Open Water Certification at 11 and Advanced Open Water Certificate at 13. Scuba-dived in Egypt, Spain, Indonesia, and Mexico.

Traveling 

Have been to >60 countries, multiple times to many of them. Lived on three continents: North America, Asia, and Europe.

History, history, history!

I am a total art history nerd. I’m also obsessed with "everything Roman” and Ancient history in general. 

Archeologist - That is what I would be if I wasn't a scientist

Reading, board games, bouldering, hiking, etc.




Last Updated on August 29, 2024