Daehwan Kim
Co-CEO at Omphalos Lifesciences Inc
Dallas, Texas, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolDaehwan Kim is a computational biologist and entrepreneur who co-founded Omphalos Lifesciences and now serves as Co-CEO, translating over a decade of academic research into a commercial platform that treats biology as a high-level programming problem. Trained as a Ph.D. computer scientist, he built influential algorithms for DNA/RNA analysis during academic appointments at Johns Hopkins and UT Southwestern, with several highly cited first-author papers. In 2020 he pivoted from low-level sequence work to inventing L++, a novel programming language for designing and simulating organisms, after spending 8,000+ hours mastering molecular detail and memorizing thousands of genes and molecules to make the language intuitive. He pairs deep systems-level engineering—evidenced by performance work on projects like the Bowtie2 aligner—with translational ambition to debug diseases at their root, positioning his company at the intersection of software, synthetic biology, and biotech commercialization. Based in Dallas, he blends hands-on development, academic rigor, and founder-driven product vision to push biology toward programmable, scalable solutions.
11 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
The University of Maryland, College Park
Github Skills (8)
bioinformatics10
c-language10
cprogramming-language10
data-structure9
genomics9
algorithm9
data-structures9
algorithms9
Programming languages (2)
Github contributions (5)
BenLangmead/bowtie2
Apr 2015 - May 2016
A fast and sensitive gapped read aligner
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:11 commits, 5 pushes, 1 branch in 1 year 1 month
Contributions summary:Daehwan contributed to the Bowtie2 aligner project by modifying core C++ code, primarily focusing on parallelization and performance improvements. Their commits involved refactoring and optimizing the multiseed search functionality. They specifically targeted the integration with threading libraries, notably TBB, and addressed compile-time errors to ensure correct program execution. These changes enhanced the aligner's ability to efficiently use multi-core processors.
pathogenalignerc-plus-plussequencinggenomics
DaehwanKimLab/hisat2
Apr 2015 - Nov 2021
Graph-based alignment (Hierarchical Graph FM index)
Contributions:2 releases, 3 reviews, 1115 commits in 6 years 8 months
graph-basedindexhierarchicalalignmentgraph
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