Zach DeBruine, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor, Department of Computing, Grand Valley State University

Zach is a cell and molecular biologist by training that made an unexpected but rewarding career transition during COVID lockdowns to bioinformatics while a Ph.D. candidate at the Van Andel Institute. During that time, he developed fastest-in-class methods for non-generative AI methods such as Non-negative Matrix Factorization. After joining Grand Valley State University, he established a research program developing generative AI models to personalize healthcare. His students are now training billion-parameter models of human genomics data to achieve foundational knowledge that can then be queried to ask clinically meaningful questions that can personalize healthcare. He continues to partner closely with the Van Andel Institute, and recently with Corewell Health, and his team has been funded by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and National Institutes of Health.