Summary
Steven Ding is a Staff Research Scientist with a decade of industry ML experience and a PhD in computer science, blending research rigor with product delivery across startups and enterprises. He has published 10+ papers at top ML venues (NeurIPS, ICLR, KDD, ACL) and serves on program committees for flagship conferences, signaling strong academic leadership. At the intersection of LLMs, GNNs, and single-cell biology, his recent work builds foundation models for single-cell data (CellPLM, Tabula) and Retrieval-Augmented Generation systems for conversational agents. As founder of OmicsML and co-founder of Qiyan Technology (successful exit), he has shipped 10+ AI products—chatbots and retrievers—that generated multi-million RMB customer savings. Currently based in Palo Alto, he splits time between Hippocratic AI and Stanford as a visiting scholar, applying foundation-model techniques to life-science problems like genetic perturbation and aging. Notably, he represents cells as tokens in pioneering foundation models, a non-obvious bridge between NLP architectures and spatial single-cell analysis.
10 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
Master's degree, Computer Science, Master's degree, Computer Science at University of Southern California
Business/Commerce, General, Business/Commerce, General at The University of Manchester
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Computer Science at Michigan State University