Hi, I'm Wyatt.

I want to understand cool things. As a kid, I caught butterflies and studied them in encyclopedias. In middle school, I made blinding magnesium sparklers, exploded a test tube (lodging a 5-mm glass shard in my palm), and nearly burned down our apartment by discarding pure zinc in the trash.

Curiosity led me to biology at the Bronx High School of Science, where I interned in Ari Melnick’s lab at Weill Cornell (now at the Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute in Barcelona). In the Melnick lab I tested novel CRISPR systems and designed gRNA arrays to avoid lentiviral recombination for simultaneous targeting of multiple loci with Dr. Johannes Hellmuth (now a physician-scientist at LMU Munich) and Dr. Coraline Mlynarczyk (her lab at Yale studies cancers that arise from germinal centers).

COVID turned my first year at Stanford into Zoom University, so I worked in industry while I couldn’t do academic research in person. I interned at Minovia Therapeutics under Dr. Yehuda Brody, then joined Gordian Biotechnology to help develop pooled AAV screening in large living animal models that recapitulate diseases of aging (think senile racehorses for osteoarthritis or NHPs for fatty liver disease), graduating Stanford in two years to transition to full time.

Nearly three years after joining Gordian and following my scientist thesis on improving signal in pooled screens, I co-founded Oncko (n-choose-k within oncology) to develop minimally cross-resistant drug combinations with the goal of curative outcomes for cancer patients with typically less than two years of overall survival. At Oncko, I helped build a platform to screen clinically efficacious molecules against combinations of cancer-relevant genetic perturbations at massive scale. I’m now back at Gordian for a focused stretch, before plans to return to academia.

This site is where I write up things I think are cool or useful. If you find mistakes in my writing or disagree with me, please tell me!