About

I’m a co-founder at Dyno Therapeutics where I lead the machine learning team. From 2014 until my graduation in 2019, I was a PhD student at Harvard. During this time, I closely worked with, and was mentored by Eric Kelsic in the lab of George Church. During grad school, I built machine learning and sampling algorithms for efficient protein design. I was also interested in using these engineering tools to understand and model fitness landscapes. Early in my PhD studies, I was focused on theoretical aspects of origins of life. I’m fascinated by organisms at the boundary of living and non-living. I have previously studied computer science with emphasis on computational biology and A.I. at MIT. I immigrated from Iran, where I briefly attened medical school.

Selected Publications

Deep diversification of an AAV capsid protein by machine learning- Drew H. Bryant*, Ali Bashir*, Sam Sinai*, Nina K. Jain, Pierce J. Ogden, Patrick F. Riley, George M. Church^, Lucy J. Colwell^, Eric D. Kelsic^. 2021. Code.

AdaLead: A simple and robust adaptive greedy search algorithm for sequence design - Sam Sinai*, Richard Wang*, Alexander Whatley*, Stewart Slocum, Elina Locane, Eric Kelsic. 2020. Code.

Comprehensive AAV capsid fitness landscape reveals a viral gene and enables machine-guided design - Pierce Ogden*, Eric Kelsic*, Sam Sinai, and George M Church. 2019. Code.

Variational auto-encoding of protein sequences - Sam Sinai, Eric Kelsic^, George Church^, and Martin Nowak^. 2017. Code.

A complete list is available on Google Scholar.

Selected Talks

Machine-guided capsid engineering for gene therapy with Eric Kelsic at the Broad MIA Seminar, 2020

Massively Parallel Deep Diversification of AAV Capsid Proteins by Machine Learning - Drew Bryant*, Ali Bashir*, Sam Sinai*, Nina Jain, Pierce Ogden, Patrick Riley, George Church^, Lucy Colwell^, Eric Kelsic^, ASGCT 2020

Machine-Guided Design of AAV Capsid Proteins with Experimentally Augmented Evolutionary Data - Sam Sinai*, Eric Kelsic*, Javen Tan, Nina Jain, Pierce Ogden, Martin Nowak^, George Church^, ASGCT 2019

Scientific “extracurriculars”

Reviewer: NeuIPS, ICLR, ICML.

Science communication: My science blog on Quora. Some older posts below.

• What makes ML in computational biology especially difficult?

• What is the most primitive form of life?

• What are some lesser known facts about Stephen Hawking?

• Why is water transparent?

Blog posts explaining my work (pardon some formatting issues):

• Coupon collecting, viral sex, and evolution. 2018

• Using a Variational Auto-encoder to predict protein function. 2017

Fun?

no.