About
Erik trained as a physician-data scientist and was an early employee at Prometheus Biosciences, a biotech company bringing precision medicine to autoimmune disease. At Prometheus, he is the founding Director of Data Science & Engineering, and is responsible for the company's vision and strategy around multimodal data curation, bioinformatics pipelines, and machine learning. His team supported a successful phase 2 clinical trial in inflammatory bowel disease, an IND application for a novel therapeutic candidate, the refinement of a clinical-stage CDx algorithm, and indication expansion activities. Erik also contributed to a patent on predicting treatment response to anti-IL12/IL-23 therapy from genetic data. His current focus is on identifying novel immune cell subtypes from histopathology and gene expression data.
Before Prometheus, Erik completed postdoctoral training at Massachusetts General Hospital, MIT, and the Broad Institute where he developed deep learning, data fusion, and contrastive learning approaches to predict clinical outcomes from high-resolution physiological and clinical data. He also evaluated computational drug discovery startups at Takeda Ventures.
Erik received an MD from Emory University and a PhD in Biomedical Engineering with a minor in Statistics from Georgia Institute of Technology where he published and patented signal processing and ML methods. He also co-founded Forge Health, a non-profit that provided startups with funding, mentors, and assistance starting clinical pilots at Emory Healthcare and the Atlanta VA Medical Center. Originally from Los Angeles, Erik earned a BS (honors) in Bioengineering from UCLA, and currently serves on the Department of Bioengineering's Alumni Advisory Board.
Blog Posts
New job at Prometheus
How to give a great chalk talk
Forge merges with Sling Health
My interview for the Hertz Fellowship
Tips for new TAs
The GT BME PhD qualifying exam
Write a great personal statement for medical school
Make $43K by not paying your medical school debt
Tips for new researchers