Michael J.T. O'Kelly

Michael J.T. O'Kelly has had a varied career, beginning with their graduate studies at MIT in 2001. There, they studied biophysics, systems biology and bioinformatics under Alexander van Oudenaarden, and their thesis encompassed rDNA silencing and recombination, with implications for eukaryotic aging. In 2008, they were Founder and President of HighlightCam, Inc. and a Computational Biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where they designed and ran high-throughput statistical analyses of SNP-chip copy-number data to distinguish cancer-related genomic modifications from free riders, built numerous tools for automation, quality control and visualization of large cancer datasets, and developed a novel bootstrap statistical algorithm for reducing noise in segmented copy-number data. From 2013 to 2015, they were Backend Lead Engineer at PlanGrid, and from 2015 to 2016, they were Director of Data Science at Bugcrowd Inc., where they worked with every department to find the areas of highest impact for AI-facilitated automated or assistive tools and processes. In 2016, they became Employee #2 and Director of Backend Engineering at Cobalt Robotics.

Michael J.T. O'Kelly's education history begins with Bard College at Simon's Rock, where they attended from 1996 to 1998. Michael J.T. then attended Carnegie Mellon University from 1998 to 2000, where they earned a BSc in Physics, Mathematics, and Chemistry. From 2001 to 2008, they attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where they earned their PhD in Physics (Biophysics). In 2009, they attended Y Combinator, but did not receive any degree or field of study.