100% scientist @BerkeleyLab, 50% artist and 0% arithmetician, https://nitter.cf/t.co/9UzFO08dzw, 🇮🇪 tweets analog
Berkeley, CA
Joined March 2009
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Now that I have a captive audience…(welcome new followers!) a monster thread on what my paper says, the approximations and the caveats… (1/aleph)
Sinéad Griffin retweeted
Students shouldn’t have to scale down their research ideas because they can’t get access to compute.
The @generalcatalyst Research Fellowship will support 20 undergraduates with up to $25K in compute from Modal to power their most ambitious ideas.
We're excited to see what you build!
Introducing @generalcatalyst Research Fellows - a program for undergraduates ready to pursue their most ambitious ideas.
We’re supporting approximately 20 exceptional undergraduate builders from leading schools. In partnership with @Modal, each fellow will receive up to $25K in compute for a 90-day project of their own.
For the bold, the curious, and those building what they wish existed: applications are open now. Tell us what you want to build! generalcatalyst.com/research…
Sinéad Griffin retweeted
Surprise 1: Anthropic acquired a one-person biotech
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Surprise 2: that person is me
Surprise 3: I’m here to tell you all about it
Yes, this is what you think it is; after 6 yrs of increasingly loose anonymity: the Professor Oak reveal post
…and yes, it has gotten so boring around here that I’m literally doxxing myself to spice up the timeline
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Ok, allow me to introduce myself. My name is Cody Tranbarger. I mostly tweet, but occasionally find time to dabble in drug dev & starting/building biotechs. My past lives span the VC, crossover, startup continuum; Prof Oak has been my way of keeping a digital foot in those worlds, despite having my physical feet planted elsewhere.
The past 18 mo, ‘elsewhere’ was Mithril Medicine, a co. I founded to develop bsAbs for LAMA2-CMD & other ECM-related genetic diseases.
Mithril was born out of hands-on building with @MikeNGladstone, @JasonPaulRhodes, @LifeSciVC, & team @atlasventure. Somehow, I made enough half-decent calls along the way (even a broken clock is right twice a day, eh?) to convince them Mithril/I warranted a small seed. While I can hardly rationalize such an outrageously cavalier bet, I’m grateful for it, & I'd partner with Atlas again in a heartbeat.
In typical AV fashion, Mithril’s primordial form was virtual, decentralized, & ultra-lean. This stage tends to be short-lived, but for Mithril, it worked surprisingly well, for surprisingly long, thanks in part to the rapid maturation of the AI tools I used liberally.
Eventually, Mithril became a bit of an experiment itself - to find the upper bound of how far it could scale as a single operator + a bunch of Claude (+ a stellar bench of part-time consultants).
In parallel, I started spending time with @nc_frey, @an1lam, & @CoefficientBio team; and promptly experienced, for the 1st time, AI at the frontier. Soon thereafter, Mithril stopped looking like an experiment, & started looking like a preview of an entirely new operating model.
From that spark came “Pipeline-in-a-Person.” The idea immediately resonated when we shared it here back in April; and it was central to the shared vision that led to Anthropic’s acquisition of Mithril, & my joining the team.
Why join Anthropic? Three reasons.
(1) For Mithril, the programs continue, with more resources & infrastructure behind them, and as much Claude as I can put to work.
(2) For me, the chance to start several more programs, & find out how many one person can actually run in parallel - an almost unprecedented luxury for a curious drug hunter.
(3) For our mission, a path to institutionalize & scale this new way of working, then put it in the hands of all of biopharma, all over the world - which, candidly, I find the most energizing.
Will AI x Bio cure diseases? Unequivocally yes, imo… but not by the route that gets the most airtime. Rather than timeline acceleration & compression, I see orchestration & parallelization as today's low-hanging fruit.
Most drug hunters see a handful of go/no-go calls in a career, & spend entirely too much of the rest trading emails (my inbox can attest).
Give them the bandwidth to run several programs at once, and the time to focus on scientific judgment, and I’m willing to bet they’ll make better calls. And at scale, better calls translate to more drugs, higher hit rates, broader patient impact, & likely, a disease or 10 or 100 cured. I couldn't be more excited to build toward that future @AnthropicAI.
Finally, a heartfelt thank you to BioTwitter/X. The end of anonymity is bittersweet, but if anyone’s earned a proper introduction, you all have.
It’s difficult to overstate how much this app has done for me: a decade of education, plenty of friends, many job opportunities, several mentors, a few investors, even a co-founder (fmr). It was the generosity of this community that inspired me to start posting 6 years ago, after just as many years lurking. I hope I’ve been able to pay it forward, in my own small way.
But, to be clear, Prof Oak isn’t going anywhere. Same beat, same themes, and now, a front-row seat to drug development at the frontier. Stay tuned for dispatches from the trenches; and remember...
Gotta Cure 'Em All
Sinéad Griffin retweeted
Someone smart once told me that even when it feels like you have few options and little agency, you can always decide how you show up to a situation…model the behavior you wish you’d see more of.
I always find that to be an extraordinarily comforting and empowering thought
Sinéad Griffin retweeted
Lol I am pretty sure someone is runing a deepseek swarm to remotely patch unpatched php boxes. Well good on them.
Sinéad Griffin retweeted
Where do you go next after reporting from the Strait of Hormuz? For the past three months, Citrini Research, an independent research firm, has been working with our team and an internal research model to see if they could use AI to create a new drug. What follows is an entertaining, candid, and humbling account of a group of motivated nonexperts (or “filthy casuals”, as Citrini would say) trying to tackle a real problem in human health with Claude.
We landed on scorpion neurotoxins, which kill over 3,000 people a year. Of the 211 designs we produced and tested, 17 met our criteria for a binder. None of the designs bound more than one toxin and none have been tested for neutralizing a toxin.
One of my favorite quotes from the piece is: “Our virtual biologist may have compressed a year's worth of work into a couple days, but biology works at the speed of life…Over two days, we watched Claude work through problems at a speed that was difficult to comprehend. For the next two months, we spent much of the time becoming familiar with laboratory turnaround times (This mostly involved sending memes in Slack).”
What is AI really capable of in bio?
To separate hype from reality, we spent 3 months working firsthand with @AnthropicAI's internal research model to see if it could create an experimental scorpion antivenom.
Introducing Citrini Therapeutics.
citriniresearch.com/p/citrin…
Sinéad Griffin retweeted
In 1993, Gao asked: if neighboring positive integers first reach 1 after the same number of ordinary Collatz steps, must their halving counts agree?
The answer is yes. doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23427…
Sinéad Griffin retweeted
Nearly every phone and computer on Earth relies on one plain-text file to know what time it is.
When a country changes its clocks with a few weeks’ notice, or Morocco pauses daylight saving for Ramadan, someone has to update that file. Since 02005, that someone has been Paul Eggert, a computer science professor at UCLA, who does it as a volunteer.
Take a look at this great data visualization to see the full story:
na2.hubs.ly/H08qtQC0
Sinéad Griffin retweeted
The LLM Hackathon for Applications in Materials and Chemistry is now the Open Scientific Intelligence Hackathon, and our next event will be Oct 21–22, 2026! As always, the event is free, hybrid, and worldwide.
A change this year as the scope now includes the physical sciences and mathematics.
Register here!
llmhackathon.github.io
Sinéad Griffin retweeted
Today, Robert E. Hall was awarded the 2026 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.
This is from a statement he released after the announcement:
Sinéad Griffin retweeted
10 remarks on AI and math that can be true all at once:
1. The recent progress is stunning and exciting.
2. The Quasi-Riemann Hypothesis is arguably Fields-medal level.
3. Mathematics is being transformed and there is no way back.
4. OpenAI doesn't give a fuck about the future of mathematics.
5. Half-baked unreadable preprints claiming major results can effectively stall mathematical progress.
6. Some mathematicians are responding with naive, overly defensive comments.
7. The social-media wankers framing this as "OpenAI tramples gatekeeping" have no experience of mathematical research.
8. The product of mathematics is clarity and understanding. Not theorems, by themselves.
9. Mathematics is a critical infrastructure of human cognition. The human need for understanding isn't obsolete and it can't be offloaded to machines.
10. We haven't "solved" mathematics and we won't get there before the Sun burns out.
Sinéad Griffin retweeted
we’re releasing REMAG, a derivative GPU first implementation of SIESTA that is purpose built for magnetic materials. we’ve seen ~111x speed ups for select compounds, and we hope that this inspires folks to bring other computing packages into the GPU era project-14.us/remag/
Sinéad Griffin retweeted
1/ For decades, Collatz orbits were modeled as random walks. Now it's a theorem: pick n at random, and its orbit's fall to its minimum IS the model's Brownian motion, with the model's mean and variance, blind to where it lands. doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23268…
Sinéad Griffin retweeted
Can’t both things be true? Accelerating advances in math is obviously good, and wanting to curtail this process is unwise as well as untenable. But it is good to have a thriving community of people who dedicate themselves to understanding and advancing the field. The challenge of the moment is that these two goals - advances and community - used to be largely aligned, and now that alignment is fraying. That really is an existential threat to academic communities not in an intellectual sense but in a practical one in that the promise of advances is how we have long justified funding the intellectual endeavors. I do think maybe it’s a good thing that academic communities are trying to articulate in a high minded way why they exist - and maybe instead of blocking progress they’ll start to focus on the many ways that the ways they currently operate are undermining those goals.
Sinéad Griffin retweeted
We’ve lost an icon. Margaret Hamilton, a computer science pioneer best known for her work at MIT leading development of the flight software for the Apollo missions to the moon, has died at 90. Read about her legacy via MIT News: news.mit.edu/2026/margaret-h…
ALT Margaret Hamilton is reclined inside a NASA spacecraft module, surrounded by control panels and switches.
Sinéad Griffin retweeted
A few more quick thoughts (a lot more to brainstorming dump later ...)
It wud be a huge mistake to think that a one time giant data generation effort is the right strategy. There is almost no evidence this is a good strategy for optimally learning causal cell biology. 1/
