Wesley Wei Qian

wesley.chin0919@gmail.com
617-637-5934
DrQ.ai · Scholar · GitHub

Experience

Founding Team | Osmo
Sep 2022 - Present
  • First research engineer; now VP of Engineering & Research. Lead a 10+ person team building AI products that digitize the sense of smell — from prototype to production.
  • LLMs & Agentic Systems: Built a multi-modal RAG system that turns text and image briefs into physical fragrance samples ($100K+ in sales within 3 months). Fine-tuned LLMs (GPT, LLaMA) with SFT and RLHF using proprietary perfumery tools to match expert preferences.
  • 0-1 ML Stack: Built the post-Google spinout ML stack using PyTorch, GCP, and W&B. Engineered and productionized GNNs and an end-to-end odor intensity pipeline from data collection to deployment that increased discovery throughput by 10×, enabling partnerships with a Top 4 fragrance house.
  • AI for Science: Led a team of ML researchers and analytical chemists to "teleport" a physical plum scent — translating GC-MS chemical signatures into digital profiles for remote reconstruction.
  • Leadership & Product Impact: Built Studio, an AI-agentic fragrance creation platform that cut formulation cycles from weeks to hours. Secured a multi-million dollar CPG partnership through AI-driven cost and safety improvements.
Student Researcher | Google
May 2018 - Sep 2022
  • Olfactory ML: Built receptor binding and metabolic activity models that led to one utility patent, four publications featured in major news outlets, and catalyzed Osmo's $60M spin-out.
  • Genomics & Structural Variants: Developed a new approach to structural variant calling with ML-based filtering; engineered a ~100× faster read-alignment method, filed as a utility patent.
  • Generative Cell Images: Developed a GAN to correct batch effects in high-content cell imaging; contributed to Google's TF-GAN library and published in Bioinformatics.
Intern | DeepMind
Sep 2021 - Dec 2021
  • AlphaFold Team: Worked on protein-folding research using JAX and the AlphaFold2 codebase, developing representation learning methods for structure prediction tasks.
Software Engineering Intern | Uber
Summer 2016 & 2017
  • [2017] Sensor & Machine Learning: Built a CRF variant to infer Uber Eats delivery events from mobile sensor data. Won 1st place at Uber's internal ML poster session.
  • [2016] Mobile Dev. & Engineering: Developed a web-based forensics tool for mobile UI testing that synchronized logs with video timestamps, reducing internal developer debugging time by ~50%.

Education

University of Illinois Urbana Champaign
2017 - 2022
Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science
Dissertation: Machine learning for drug discovery and beyond (advisor: Jian Peng)
GPA: 4.00 / 4.00 | University Fellowship | Richard T. Cheng Endowed Fellowship
Brandeis University
2013 - 2017
Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Neuroscience
GPA: 3.96 / 4.00 | Summa Cum Laude | Phi Beta Kappa (Junior) | Schiff Fellowship

Recent & Selected Publications (*equal contribution)

New York Smells: A Large Multimodal Dataset for Olfaction
arXiv (2025)
Ege Ozguroglu, Junbang Liang, Ruoshi Liu, Mia Chiquier, Michael DeTienne, Wesley W. Qian, Alexandra Horowitz, Andrew Owens, Carl Vondrick
A deep learning and digital archaeology approach for mosquito repellent discovery
Chemical Science (2025)
Jennifer N. Wei*, Carlos Ruiz*, Marnix Vlot*, Benjamin Sanchez-Lengeling, Brian K. Lee, Luuk Berning, Martijn W. Vos, Rob WM Henderson, Wesley W. Qian, Jacob N. Sanders, D. Michael Ando, Kurt M. Groetsch, Richard C. Gerkin, Alexander B. Wiltschko, Jeffrey A. Riffell, Koen J. Dechering
A Principal Odor Map Unifies Diverse Tasks in Human Olfactory Perception
Science (2023)
Brian K. Lee*, Emily E Mayhew*, Benjamin Sanchez-Lengeling, Jennifer N. Wei, Wesley W. Qian, Kelsie Little, Matthew Andres, Britney B. Nguyen, Theresa Moloy, Jacob Yasonik, Jane K. Parker, Richard C. Gerkin, Joel D. Mainland, Alexander B. Wiltschko
Metabolic activity organizes olfactory representations
eLife (2023)
Wesley W. Qian, Jennifer N. Wei, Benjamin Sanchez-Lengeling, Brian K. Lee, Yunan Luo, Marnix Vlot, Koen Dechering, Jian Peng, Richard C. Gerkin, Alexander B. Wiltschko
3D Equivariant Diffusion for Target-Aware Molecule Generation and Affinity Prediction
ICLR (2023)
Jiaqi Guan*, Wesley W. Qian*, Xingang Peng, Yufeng Su, Jian Peng, Jianzhu Ma
Energy-Inspired Molecular Conformation Optimization
ICLR (2022)
Jiaqi Guan*, Wesley W. Qian*, Qiang Liu, Wei-Ying Ma, Jianzhu Ma, Jian Peng
Integrating Deep Neural Networks and Symbolic Inference for Organic Reactivity Prediction
ACS National Meeting (2021)
Wesley W. Qian*, Nathan T. Russell*, Claire L. W. Simons, Yunan Luo, Martin D. Burke, Jian Peng
Batch Equalization with a Generative Adversarial Network
Bioinformatics (2020)
Wesley W. Qian, Cassandra Xia, Subhashini Venugopalan, Arunachalam Narayanaswamy, Michelle Dimon, George W. Ashdown, Jake Baum, Jian Peng, D Michael Ando

Other Publication

Pervasive mislocalization of pathogenic coding variants underlying human disorders
Cell (2024)
Jessica Lacoste, Marzieh Haghighi, Shahan Haider, Chloe Reno, Zhen-Yuan Lin, Dmitri Segal, Wesley W. Qian, Xueting Xiong, Tanisha Teelucksingh, Esteban Miglietta, Hamdah Shafqat-Abbasi, Pearl V. Ryder, Rebecca Senft, Beth A. Cimini, Ryan R. Murray, Chantal Nyirakanani, Tong Hao, Gregory G. McClain, Frederick P. Roth, Michael A. Calderwood, David E. Hill, Marc Vidal, S Stephen Yi, Nidhi Sahni, Jian Peng, Anne-Claude Gingras, Shantanu Singh, Anne E. Carpenter, Mikko Taipale
A central chaperone-like role for 14-3-3 proteins in human cells
Molecular Cell (2023)
Dmitri Segal, Stefan Maier, Giovanni J Mastromarco, Wesley W. Qian, Syed Nabeel-Shah, Hyunmin Lee, Gaelen Moore, Jessica Lacoste, Brett Larsen, Zhen-Yuan Lin, Abeeshan Selvabaskaran, Karen Liu, Craig Smibert, Zhaolei Zhang, Jack Greenblatt, Jian Peng, Hyun O Lee, Anne-Claude Gingras, Mikko Taipale
ECNet is an evolutionary context-integrated deep learning framework for protein engineering
Nature Communication (2021)
Yunan Luo, Guangde Jiang, Tianhao Yu, Yang Liu, Lam Vo, Hantian Ding, Yufeng Su, Wesley W. Qian, Huimin Zhao, Jian Peng
Comprehensive interactome profiling of the human Hsp70 network highlights functional differentiation of J domains
Molecular Cell (2021)
Benjamin L. Piette, Nader Alerasool, Zhen-Yuan Lin, Jessica Lacoste, Mandy Hiu Yi Lam, Wesley W. Qian, Stephanie Tran, Brett Larsen, Eric Campos, Jian Peng, Anne-Claude Gingras, Mikko Taipale
Evaluating Attribution for Graph Neural Networks
NeurIPS (2020)
Benjamin Sanchez-Lengeling, Jennifer Wei, Brian Lee, Emily Reif, Peter Wang, Wesley W. Qian, Kevin McCloskey, Lucy Colwell, Alexander B. Wiltschko
Evolutionary context-integrated deep sequence modeling for protein engineering
RECOMB (2020)
Yunan Luo, Lam Vo, Hantian Ding, Yufeng Su, Yang Liu, Wesley W. Qian, Huimin Zhao, Jian Peng

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