Abel Chiao

Abel Chiao has a diverse background in scientific research and software engineering. Abel is currently employed as a Full Stack Developer at Prelim since 2021. Prior to that, they were the first employee and Scientist at Tierra Biosciences from 2016 to 2021, where they spearheaded the technology platform's biochemistry and automation R&D, enabling quarter-over-quarter doubling of experimental throughput. Abel is an inventor on 6 patent applications (2 published). From 2015 to 2016, they were a Research Associate at Caltech, where they joined the Murray Lab to commercialize cell-free protein expression technology and pioneered 100-fold reduction in base platform reagent cost without sacrificing genetic circuit prototyping capabilities and other key performance parameters. From 2012 to 2015, they were an Undergraduate Researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Lippard Research Group, where they executed and assisted in characterization/functional studies of phenanthriplatin, a novel platinum anticancer agent. Abel also set up crystallization trials for phenanthriplatin-DNA conjugates to study binding interactions and maintained human tumor cell lines and evaluated effect of drug combinations via MTT assay for synergism. From 2011 to 2012, they were an Undergraduate Research Assistant at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California, where they assisted researchers in Dr. Wei Li's research group in studying heat-shock-protein-90a, which was shown to greatly promote wound healing. Abel also produced recombinant Hsp90a via pET expression system.

Abel Chiao received a Bachelor of Science in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2014. In 2019, Abel Chiao attended App Academy to study Computer Software Engineering.