Jeff Ozdemir PhD

Head of Platform & Cofounder

With domain expertise spanning both machine learning and molecular biology, Jeff is the chief architect of Kernal Bio’s machine learning pipeline. He was working on post-doctoral research focused on a portion of the mRNA, which he had come to realize was modular when Burak ask him to join as a co-founder. Since mRNA is basically the messenger program of DNA,  you could take it out and program it to produce the specific kind of therapeutic protein. This idea fascinated him considering the enormous potential of synthetic biology. He earned his PhD at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at the department of Molecular Genetics, where he studied the SREBP pathway,  (SREBP — sterol regulatory element binding protein — pathway plays an essential role in both metabolic diseases and tumor development.) He received his postdoctoral training at Harvard Medical School investigating tissue-specific expression and function of an enzyme in a mouse model. He then went on to become a biochemistry instructor at MIT’s Minority Introduction to Engineering and Science Program. He has 16 published papers in scientific journals and holds seven patents.