Zach Debruine
Founder CEO at Grand Valley State University
Grand Rapids, Michigan, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolZach Debruine is a founder-CEO, researcher, and educator with a decade of experience building ML-driven tools for genomics and rare disease communities. As founder of Herd Social he’s combining domain expertise and product design to create a social platform tailored to families and patients affected by rare conditions. He leads student research at Grand Valley State University, developing multimodal generative AI models for large-scale single-cell and genomics data while teaching practical, interdisciplinary AI literacy. Zach’s academic work includes a PhD and postdoctoral development of the fastest Non-negative Matrix Factorization implementation and high-performance bioinformatics code (Rcpp/C++) used in single-cell modeling. A rare-disease parent himself, he brings personal urgency to translational research and community-building, pairing wet-lab roots with production ML engineering (PyTorch). Based in Grand Rapids, MI, he mentors early-career researchers and bridges entrepreneurship, open-source tooling, and biomedical impact.
10 years of coding experience
Bachelor of Science, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Bachelor of Science, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Hope CollegeGraduate Student, Bioinformatics and Biochemistry, Graduate Student, Bioinformatics and Biochemistry at Van Andel Institute Graduate School
English, Dutch
Stackoverflow
3,627reputation
925kreached
36answers
64questions
Github Skills (80)
nmf10
nearest-neighbors10
rcpp10
genomics10
clustering10
r10
sparse-matrix10
hierarchical-clustering10
gaussian-mixture-models10
single-cell-genomics10
matrix-factorization10
gmm10
rcppeigen10
cran10
single-cell-analysis9
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
zdebruine/singlet
Aug 2021 - Feb 2023
Contributions:160 commits, 22 PRs, 163 pushes in 1 year 6 months
cell-analysisfactorizationnon-negative-matrix-factorizationmatrix-factorizationbioinformatics
zdebruine/RcppML
Apr 2021 - Dec 2022
Rcpp Machine Learning: Fast robust NMF, divisive clustering, and more
Contributions:1 review, 545 commits, 15 PRs in 1 year 7 months
divisive-clusteringsparse-matrixdata-sciencercppeigengaussian-mixture-models
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