Steven Ding
Staff Research Scientist at Stanford University
Palo Alto, California, United States
Summary
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Senior🎓
Top SchoolSteven 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 CaliforniaBusiness/Commerce, General, Business/Commerce, General at The University of ManchesterDoctor of Philosophy - PhD, Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Computer Science at Michigan State University
Stackoverflow
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Github Skills (56)
benchmark10
dance10
spatial-transcriptomics10
large-language-models10
transcriptomics10
survey10
single-cell-analysis10
bioinformatics10
computational-biology10
data-science9
geometric-deep-learning9
pytorch9
pii9
python9
machine-learning9
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
OmicsML/awesome-deep-learning-single-cell-papers
Jun 2022 - Jan 2023
Contributions:2 reviews, 69 commits, 5 PRs in 7 months
OmicsML/awesome-foundation-model-single-cell-papers
Jun 2023 - Sep 2025
Contributions:1 review, 4 PRs, 79 pushes in 2 years 3 months
ai-virtual-cellsingle-cell-multiomicssingle-cell-foundation-modellarge-language-modelssurvey
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