Nao Hiranuma

Nao Hiranuma, Ph.D., serves as the Director of Machine Learning Research and co-founder at Vilya since April 2022, focusing on the training and inference of large-scale deep learning models for chemical data. Prior to this role, Nao was a Scientific Advisor and co-founder at the Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington, contributing to the development of a unified accuracy score model for various chemistry types. Nao's academic journey includes a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Washington, where involvement as a research assistant and teaching assistant included lectures on deep learning for computational biology. Previous experiences also include a research internship at Cogent Labs and participation in research projects at Carleton College, where dual degrees in Biology and Computer Science were obtained.