Victor Yuan
About me
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Hello! I’m Victor, a data scientist at Sonoma Biotherapeutics. I help develop T-cell-based therapies for autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis. My favorite part of the job is working with brilliant colleagues on new drugs that could improve patients’ lives.
- 2011BSc
- 2016PhD
- 2022Sonoma
- Present
I first encountered bioinformatics in 2016 as a first-year graduate student in UBC’s Genome Sciences and Technology program. My undergrad was in Cell and Molecular Biology (Honours thesis: CRISPR x Yeast), so I was coming in pretty green to computation and statistics. I feel fortunate to have spent the next five years in an incredibly supportive environment, learning about bioinformatics, genomics, and machine learning. My PhD thesis applied machine learning and cellular epigenetics to study placental development.
I graduated with my PhD in 2022, a brighter time in biotech’s recent history, and found myself at Jeff Bluestone’s Treg company, Sonoma. I still work there today, alongside incredibly talented and kind colleagues developing a new therapy.
Previously, on my homepage, I would list my best technical skills, but nowadays, with AI, I question what value I really bring as a scientist. Two things come to mind:
I’m a good thinker
I think a lot of degree holders will say some version of this. But in my opinion, in the age where anyone can generate something that seems sensible (with help of AI), it’s even more important than before to have a shrewd eye towards content. As a scientist who lives in data, I’m good at interpreting patterns, understanding what conclusions they support, and figuring out what to do next while recognizing their limitations.
I’m good at presenting data
I don’t know why, but whenever I see a graph, my mind impulsively lists off criticisms: why is the font size so small? The axis labels are not informative. Pie charts need to die. I probably spend too much time on presentation. I have accumulated a lot of intuition about designing data visualiations. Occasionaly I receive some praise for it - I’ve won some contests for my visualizations (plotnine and gt).