Joshua Meier is a machine learning leader and entrepreneur with 14 years of experience bridging deep learning and computational biology, currently co-founder of Chai Discovery in San Francisco. As a platform lead at Facebook AI he co-created widely used protein language models (ESM-1b/1v) and contributes to facebookresearch/esm and fairseq—work that powers many biopharma workflows and includes practical tooling like FastaDataset and contact-prediction APIs. He’s held senior AI roles at Absci and research positions at OpenAI and the Broad Institute, combining large-scale generative model expertise with applied bioinformatics. Notably, his biotech entrepreneurship began at 16 running a high-school lab startup, underscoring a long-standing drive to apply ML to real-world biology.
14 years of coding experience
5 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science (MS) Computer Science, Master of Science (MS) Computer Science at Harvard University
Facebook AI Research Sequence-to-Sequence Toolkit written in Python.
Role in this project:
ML Engineer
Contributions:26 commits, 3 comments, 1 issue in 9 months
Contributions summary:Joshua primarily contributed to the development of LSTM-based models within the fairseq framework. Their work included implementing standalone LSTM decoder language models, supporting residual connections in LSTM models, and enabling the choice of max tokens in masked LM models. Furthermore, they addressed memory leak issues in the masked LM criterion and fixed truncation in the sentence ranking task, demonstrating a focus on both model development and framework maintenance. They also added a FastaDataset, which allows the use of FASTA files which are common in bioinformatics.
Evolutionary Scale Modeling (esm): Pretrained language models for proteins
Role in this project:
ML Engineer
Contributions:7 commits, 10 pushes, 2 branches in 3 months
Contributions summary:Joshua primarily contributed to the development and maintenance of the ESM model, focusing on enhancements and additions. They implemented a variant prediction tutorial, showcasing the application of ESM representations in downstream tasks. Contributions included adding new features like contact prediction APIs, updating documentation, and fixing minor bugs. These changes align with the project's objective of providing pretrained language models for proteins.
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