Rachel Hovde, Head of Data Science at Chimera Bioengineering.
Rachel discovered her interest in immunology while doing her graduate work in Statistics at Stanford, and looks for projects where she can create a mathematical picture of the immune system and combine it with the incredible lab research and medical work of her colleagues. She’s the head of data science at Chimera Bioengineering, where she builds mathematical models to predict properties of RNA-protein interactions to improve CAR T-cell cancer therapies. She’s also collaborating on a project with Rishi Bedi from Stanford and Jake Glanville of Distributed Bio to use autoencoders and convolutional neural nets to improve binding and thermostability of engineered antibodies. She occasionally moonlights as a Shakespearean actress.