Chris is a biologist, entrepreneur, and AI researcher interested in advancing frontier biological AI through reinforcement learning and high-throughput biophysical measurement. He previously built machine learning-driven biotech ventures and led a research group focused on biological evaluation and applications of frontier models. At Astera, Chris is building Polytope Bio, a project to test the hypothesis that aligning generative biology toward sequences that fold and function can teach AI fundamental rules of biology and physics. Chris’s work in AI x Bio is informed by a background in evolutionary biology, genetics, and machine learning. When he’s not training models, Chris spends his free time escaping the city to enjoy the outdoors with his wife, daughter, and two dogs.