Bioinformatics PhD candidate at the University of Georgia, defending in Fall/Winter 2026. My dissertation is on gene duplication in Populus, but lately most of my attention has gone to genomic foundation models β specifically, how robust and interpretable they actually are.
The question I keep pulling on: these models post strong benchmark numbers, but biologically meaningless edits will still flip their predictions. I attack them under constraints a biologist would accept, then look inside to see what actually changed.
I'm looking for computational biology / ML research roles starting Fall 2026 β especially work on evaluating and interpreting models over biological sequence data β and I also do management consulting. Five peer-reviewed papers so far, mostly plant genomics.
- Probing the robustness & interpretability of genomic foundation models
- Consulting part-time with the Computational Biology Consulting Group at UGA's Institute of Bioinformatics
- Building portable, agent-driven research tooling
| agentic-research-toolkit | Portable agentic research workflows (SKILL.md) written for discovery over confirmation |
| biosafe-genai-network | Mapping the who's-who in biosafety + AI |
| HATCH2024-nutrigenomics | A plant-based diet planner for space missions β Snakemake + OpenAI API + Streamlit (HATCH 2024) |
| bioLOLPython | Analyze biological sequences with internet slang β live demo |
| IOB_seminar_transcript | Whisper-transcribed archive of the UGA Institute of Bioinformatics seminar series |
More, including a 14-day RNA-seq tutorial series, on my site.
- Website β https://chenhsieh.xyz
- Google Scholar β https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=o3PWSMwAAAAJ&hl=en
- LinkedIn β https://www.linkedin.com/in/chen-hsieh/
- Email β chen.hsieh.uga@gmail.com