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
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
Global Bioeconomy Summit
Boston-based Phage Therapy Summit
Biocom x Nucleate
iGEM Grand Jamboree (twice)
Amgen Asia Symposium
Yale-NUS Leadership Symposium and others
The Blue Payphone Podcast - How to become a BIO-ENTREPRENEUR?
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