CALTECH BIOENGINEERING
I'm especially interested in aging. This summer I'm working at the Sun Lab / Ragon Institute on transcriptomic aging clocks and computational approaches for finding candidate interventions.
Sun Lab / Ragon Institute · Summer 2026
Using transcriptomic aging models to identify candidate anti-aging interventions and study when they may be most useful.
01 / Projects
At the Caltech Longevity Hackathon, I came up with and led the development of an app for adult children to track changes in an older parent's functional aging using measures such as gait speed and reaction time.
The app turns those measurements into a dashboard for tracking changes over time. I led the team and pitched the product to healthcare professionals at the hackathon.
A prototype learning app that creates a short curriculum around a user's goal and adapts the material based on their answers.
A prototype goal-management agent that gives a user one concrete action to complete, checks whether it was done, and can attach a simulated commitment penalty.
02 / Research
Current and recent work in computational biology, chemistry, and aging.
I'm using transcriptomic aging models to identify perturbations that may shift cells toward younger expression states and to study how intervention timing affects predicted response.
Lab profile ↗As an intern at Rowan, I independently benchmarked ML-based computational chemistry models against experimental reduction-potential and electron-affinity data and first-authored the resulting preprint.
Preprint ↗Using roughly 13,000 single-stereocenter compounds and machine learning to optimize a simple substituent-ranking rule for predicting the sign of optical rotation.
Abstract ↗A proposal to test whether layered viral-vector targeting—cell entry, transcriptional gating, and senescence-selective payloads—can improve the selectivity of senescent-cell clearance.
Proposal ↗03 / About
I'm a bioengineering student at Caltech. I spend most of my time doing research, building software, and learning more biology and machine learning.
Summer 2026: Cambridge, working on computational aging biology.
Teaching: 230+ hours tutoring on Schoolhouse.world; I led the Chemistry Subworld and built an organic chemistry course.
Interests: aging, computational biology, molecular ML, and software.
Contact: sawyervanzanten@gmail.com