Summary
Zhaleh Safikhani is a Principal Research Scientist II with 11 years of experience applying machine learning to bioinformatics and drug discovery, currently based in Cambridge, MA. She blends deep academic training (PhD in Bioinformatics) with industrial leadership, having led ML teams at Cyclica and Skyhawk and now driving research at AbbVie. Her strengths include statistical inference at scale and turning complex biological data into actionable models, informed by a background as a software developer and team lead. Colleagues describe her as creative and passionately curious, able to bridge rigorous research and production-ready solutions. An oft-overlooked asset is her sustained cross-disciplinary trajectory—from software engineering to postdoctoral machine learning research—giving her rare fluency across code, models, and biology.
11 years of coding experience
19 years of employment as a software developer
Amirkabir University of Technology
PhD, Bioinformatics, PhD, Bioinformatics at University of Tehran