Annual Meeting

Gene Yeo

Keynote Address March 11
Large-language models to decode RNA biology and empower RNA therapeutics

Gene W. Yeo, PhD, MBA, is an academic and biotechnology board member, scientific founder, and internationally recognized leader in RNA biology and RNA-based therapeutics. He currently serves as Chief Scientist of Sanford Laboratories for Innovative Medicines and is the founding Director of the Center for RNA Technologies and Therapeutics at the University of California San Diego, where he also holds the Sanford Stem Cell Institute Endowed Chair.

Dr. Yeo has over two decades of experience spanning RNA biology, computational genomics, and translational medicine, with deep expertise in RNA therapeutic modalities including antisense oligonucleotides, siRNA, mRNA, circular RNA, and RNA-targeting CRISPR technologies. His work has helped establish RNA-binding proteins as druggable targets across neurodegeneration, oncology, and rare disease, and he has pioneered widely adopted experimental and computational platforms for RNA target discovery and validation.

An active entrepreneur, Dr. Yeo is a co-founder of multiple biotechnology companies including Proteona (acquired by Singleron), Locanabio, Eclipse Bioinnovations, Trotana, and Orbital Therapeutics, the latter of which was acquired by Bristol Myers Squibb. He currently serves on the boards of directors and scientific advisory boards of numerous life science and RNA-focused companies, and regularly advises venture capital firms on scientific strategy, diligence, and portfolio development.

Dr. Yeo has authored approximately 300 peer-reviewed publications and is among the world’s most highly cited researchers across molecular biology and genomics. His contributions have been recognized with numerous honors, including designation as a Paul Allen Distinguished Investigator, the RNA Society’s Elisa Izaurralde Award, the Academia Europaea Sydney Brenner Medal, and repeated selection as a Highly Cited Researcher.

Dr. Yeo received his PhD in Computational Neuroscience from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an MBA from the UC San Diego Rady School of Management, and dual bachelor’s degrees in Chemical Engineering and Economics from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He brings to boards a rare combination of deep mechanistic insight, translational rigor, and strategic perspective at the intersection of science, medicine, and venture creation.

Hanna Hajishirzi

Keynote Address March 12
Olmo 3: Defining the Future of Open-Science AI with Model Flows

Hanna Hajishirzi is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Washington. Her research spans generative AI and natural language processing, with a focus on building pioneering, open-science AI solutions.

She co-leads the OLMo and Tulu projects, advancing fully open language and reasoning models to accelerate the science of AI, empower the research community, and champion openness as a driver of innovation. These models have been downloaded more than 10 million times as of 2025 and were recognized with GeekWire's Innovation of the Year award. She is a co-PI of a $152M NSF- and NVIDIA-supported grant to develop the next generation of open multimodal models.

She is an ACL fellow (2025) and Sloan fellow (2021), and a recipient of the Uncommon Thinker Award (2025), the NSF CAREER Award (2021), Torode family Career development professorship (2022), the Allen Distinguished Investigator Award (2014), the UIUC Alumni Award (2024), and was a finalist for the VentureBeat Women in AI Award (2024, 2025). Her research has earned recognition at leading venues, with papers receiving or being finalists for awards at ACL 2025, CVPR 2025, ACL 2024 (Best Paper and Best Resource Paper), CVPR 2022, AKBC 2020, and SIGDIAL 2012.

Her work has been widely featured in leading magazines and newspapers. She has delivered keynote talks at premier venues including the White House, COLM, PyTorch, and Linux, and has given distinguished lectures at universities such as Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania.