Yale PhD quit after lymphoma diagnosis to build foundation models for antibody drugs at Aureka Bio
anshulkundaje · x · 2026-09-19
Will Hua, who leads frontier AI research at Aureka Bio, shares his story: after a BSc/MSc at McGill and Mila working on GNNs and generative models with Will Hamilton, Doina Precup, and Guy Wolf, he entered a PhD at Yale.
Diagnosed with lymphoma in 2025, he decided incremental academic papers weren't worth his time, left Yale, and joined Aureka Bio in Southern California. His team builds foundation models for antibody therapeutics, anchored by a lab-in-the-loop recursive self-improvement AIxBio engine, alongside an applied AI team and automated labs.
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