Tom Sercu

Tom Sercu serves as vice president of AI and engineering. Previously, he was co-founder and vice president of engineering at EvolutionaryScale, playing a key role in building the company. His contributions at EvolutionaryScale span across engineering, AI research, leading the company’s organization building and hiring, and setting up much of the operations.

Before becoming an entrepreneur, Tom was an AI research engineer and research manager. His research expertise spans several areas of deep learning, including bridging domains by applying breakthrough neural architectures from computer vision to speech recognition at New York University and IBM Research's T.J. Watson Research Center. He later worked on the theoretical foundations of generative models, precursors to today’s generative AI era, before focusing on the intersection of foundational AI and biology. As co-leader of the protein team at Meta AI (FAIR) in New York, Tom developed with the ESM the first transformer protein language model, ESM-1, followed by ESM-1b, ESM2, ESMFold, and the ESM Atlas resource.