Hi! My name is Carl Edwards. I’m a Senior AI Scientist at Genentech R&D in the AI - Biology & Translation (AIBT) department. I’m currently working on agent systems, multimodal biology foundation models, and how these systems can work together to accelerate scientific discovery, including modalities such as single cell RNA-seq, CRISPR screens, small molecules, DNA, etc. My recent public research focuses on teaching AI systems to design and adapt experiments, particularly in the context of CRISPR screens.

I received my PhD in Computer Science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2025, advised by Professor Heng Ji. There, I worked on multimodal chemistry NLP, with applications in cancer drugs, click chemistry, organic photovoltaics, and catalyst design.

Current Research Interests:

• Multimodal foundation models for biology and chemistry
• Experimental design and hypothesis generation
• Adaptive systems for scientific discovery
• Language-centered multimodality in science

I’m also interested in broader applications of AI to chemistry and materials science, including metal-organic frameworks, molecular machines, and crystal systems, although these are not the focus of my current work.

News

• Excited to release AssayLoop! Really excited about this direction of teaching models how to conduct experiments using previous experiments!

• AssayBench has been accepted at NeurIPS26 E&D! We take the virtual cell paradigm and move it up to functional, assay level readouts where real drug discovery experiments happen!

• [February 2026] My dissertation is now available online!

Links

The first “Language + Molecules” workshop at ACL24 and dataset.

The comprehensive “Language + Molecules” Tutorial, video, slides, and material.