Welcome to Owl Posting!
What is this?
This is a blog called Owl Posting, which covers the intersection of biology and machine learning, colloquially known as bio-ML, and sometimes other things. It started in April 2024, and an article is released around every 1-2 weeks.
Who are you?
My name is Abhi. Here is my X and LinkedIn, and I live in NYC.
If you’d like to contact me, send me an email at abhishaike@gmail.com or DM me on Twitter.
I am currently doing a mixture of research, engineering, and writing at Noetik, which is building foundation models of tumor microenvironments. Before that, I did ML engineering at Dyno Therapeutics, doing protein engineering to improve AAV delivery for gene therapy. And before even that, I did ML research at Elevance Health, building multimorbidity risk stratification models using medical claims data.
Can you help me?
Maybe!
If you are a bio-ML company, and are looking for interesting candidates, reach out! I’ve helped direct a few talented scientists (both computational and wetlab) to good places and would like to do it more. Similarly, you are looking for a job in this space, reach out for a chat. This is all free, I care about this field, and would like talented people to wind up in good places.
Alternatively, if you are looking to get your product/face/investment thesis in front of a specific audience, reach out to sponsor a podcast or article. I have about 50,000~ monthly visitors to this site, and basically all of them are scientists/engineers/founders/investors in this very specific niche. Nothing I create will be influenced by a sponsorships viewpoint.
Why is this blog called Owl Posting?
There is a small species of owl that lives in the Heilongjiang province of China. It weighs just 400 grams, eats a single grape a month, and spends its evenings writing poetry about the river that flows near it. Its eyes are a deep purple, and it smells of lavender. There are only five of them in existence. I have taken one of them, and keep it in my closet, where its natural instincts of poetry generation have been repurposed in service of the articles I write. The name of this blog has been chosen in honor of it. This is not cruel, or, perhaps, it is cruel, but it is cruel in the same way that sled dogs are cruel, or have cruelty done to them, or participate in cruelty in ways they do not fully recognize—which is to say, the owl does not seem unhappy. It scribbles its thought down, I feed it the grape, and it vibrates in excitement, because grapes are not only its sustenance, but divine, an essential aspect of an esoteric religion it and its kin have developed. Of course, the owl is an owl, and does not always understand the job at hand. Some nights I open the closet door and find it has written nothing, and I do not punish it for this; it always receives its grape. Other nights there are seventeen stanzas about the Songhua River, and I must explain, gently, as it stares with me with huge, shining eyes, that our readers do not care about that. Other times, it creates something beautiful, and I refine the results to post online. This is how most writing on the planet is done, but very few people, other than me, are honest about the process.
Does this blog have categories?
Yes! The blog can be separated into the following categories (alongside the most-read articles in that section).
Primers
These are intended to be long, extensively researched deep-dives into specific scientific topics. I stick to the facts as much as possible, but also offer my own opinion pretty frequently. Some examples:
Arguments
These are intended to have a reasonably strong opinion, with mildly more conviction than my actual opinion. Think of it closer to a persuasive essay than a review on the topic, which my ‘primers’ are more-so meant for. Do Your Own Research applies for all my posts, but especially so with these.
Startups
These are posts that each will focus on a single startup that I think is interesting, and deeply examine their scientific foundations, product, and risks. These will typically be biotech startups, but I may also include deep-tech startups in general.
The ML drug discovery startup trying really, really hard to not cheat
Better antibodies by engineering targets, not engineering antibodies
The unreasonable effectiveness of plasmid sequencing as a service
Fiction
Just fiction stories, almost always ones with a bio-themed tint to them, but sometimes not.
Misc
These are just essays that are neither arguments nor primers nor startups nor fiction. Just stuff I was thinking about and wanted to write something about.
Podcast
For many would-be biology articles, I get halfway through them and realize that it’d be hard to do the topic justice, even with Claude/Gemini/ChatGPT assistance. In those cases, I go out and find the most talented person in the field, and have a long-form conversation with them, all filmed in a studio here in NYC. If you’d be interested in coming on, you should apply to be a podcast guest!
Can AI improve the current state of molecular simulation? (Corin & Ari Wagen, Ep #1)
What could Alphafold 4 look like? (Sergey Ovchinnikov, Ep #3)
How do you make a 250x better vaccine at 1/10 the cost? Develop it in India. (Soham Sankaran, Ep #2)
Art
This is more for fun than anything else, but I think biology as a field could do with better aesthetics. So, every now and then, I’ll do some design work and throw it up to be sold. Much of the art here is broadly nice to look at (in my opinion!), but often contain little details only understandable to people who are in the field, which is a balance I quite like. Here is the link.
And the entirety of my posts (including podcasts) can be accessed via the ‘Archive’ section.
