Laurence Yang
Co-investigator and Project Co-Lead Emeritus
Dr. Laurence Yang is Founder & Principal of Philancea Network Inc., where he develops a blend of first-principles modeling, active learning, and AI/ML to accelerate biotech R&D. He is also adjunct assistant professor in the departments of Chemical Engineering and Biology at Queen's University. He co-founded the Open Plastic consortium and served as Project Leader from 2020-2024, before pivoting to entrepreneurial pursuits. He earned his PhD in Chemical Engineering at the University of Toronto in 2012, after which he worked as scientist at synthetic biology company Intrexon Corp., before and after its $1.5B IPO. He then worked as a postdoctoral fellow, and then assistant project scientist at UCSD (Bioengineering department), where he developed multi-scale cell simulators. He was assistant professor in the department of Chemical Engineering at Queen's University from 2019-2024. His research focuses on multi-scale simulators, AI/ML techniques including graph neural networks, and numerical optimization for biotech and sustainability.
