Yunha Hwang

Yunha Hwang is a Samuel A. Goldblitch Career Development Assistant Professor in Biology, EECS, and the Schwarzman College of Computing. Hwang also serves as the Co-founder and Chief Scientist at Tatta Bio, a scientific nonprofit dedicated to advancing genomic AI for biological discovery. She received her Ph.D. in Biology from Harvard University and B.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University. Her research interests span machine learning for microbial evolution, biomanufacturing, and open science.

AI2050 Project

Hwang’s project develops methods to connect biological sequences with the chemical reactions they produce. While genomic data has expanded rapidly, most enzyme functions remain uncharacterized, and many chemical signals lack clear biological interpretation. This work combines machine learning with experimental pipelines to generate datasets linking enzyme sequences to chemical perturbations. By learning shared representations across these data types, the project aims to improve our ability to infer enzyme function and discover new biochemical reactions. More broadly, it contributes to building AI systems that can better model and reason about biological and chemical processes.