Ruian Shi
Co-Founder at Blank Bio (YC S25)
Old Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolRuian Shi is a Co-Founder and soon-to-be former PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Toronto and the Vector Institute, bringing 11 years of industry and research experience at the intersection of deep learning, time series methods, and biomedical applications. He has practical production engineering chops from multiple roles at Amazon—spanning SDE work on financial ledgers and recommender systems to applied science internships—and research internships at Pinterest and Memorial Sloan Kettering that bridge ML research and real-world impact. His academic work focuses on deep time series modeling, complemented by hands-on bioinformatics and lab experience early in his career, giving him a rare blend of computational and biological insight. Now building a YC-backed startup (Blank Bio, YC S25), he leverages both rigorous PhD training and product-focused engineering to translate advanced models into deployable systems. Colleagues describe him as someone who fluidly moves between prototyping research ideas and shipping production-grade software—often surfacing domain knowledge from biology to inform ML solutions.
11 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD Computer Science at University of Toronto
Github Skills (19)
gene-expression7
dna-sequences7
rna-seq5
bioinformatics4
infer3
biology3
pre-trained-model2
artificial-intelligence2
science2
transformer2
deep-learning2
machine-learning1
data-science1
foundation-models1
normalizing1
Programming languages (2)
Github contributions (5)
jimufan/eplant
Aug 2016 - Sep 2022
Contributions:4 PRs in 6 years 2 months
IanShi1996/LatentSegmentedODE
May 2021 - Jul 2021
Contributions:18 commits, 12 pushes, 1 branch in 1 month
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