Wesley Wei Qian

wesley.chin0919@gmail.com
DrQ.ai · LinkedIn · Scholar · GitHub

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Experience

Osmo

VP, Engineering & Research
Jan 2026 - Present
We built a factory with many robots and turned scent prompting into a fragrance business, powered by software and AI from my team.
Director, Applied Research
Jan 2025 - Jan 2026
I worked with machine learning researchers and human-data experts to land our first multimillion-dollar enterprise deal with one of the world's largest CPG companies.
Manager, Machine Learning
Jan 2024 - Jan 2025
2024 was a wild year for new capabilities: I invented scent prompting, taught an LLM to write fragrance formulas, and worked with researchers and chemists to teleport the scent of a plum from headspace GC-MS.
Founding Research Engineer
Sep 2022 - Jan 2024
After spinning Osmo out of Google, I rebuilt our ML stack with PyTorch, PyG, W&B, and GCP and developed a GNN that powered ingredient discovery. I learned rating data is a scam, but a fixable one.

Google

Student Researcher, Olfaction
Jun 2020 - Aug 2022
I decided that finding “drugs” for the human nose sounded cool, so I joined Google Brain to discover new smells, explore olfaction across the animal kingdom, and find bad-smelling molecules for mosquitoes.
Student Researcher, Genomics
May 2019 - May 2020
I worked with god-tier software engineers to build a genomics algorithm that ran structural variant calling across many CPUs in parallel, 100x faster than the state of the art.
Research Intern, Cellular Imaging
May 2018 - Aug 2018
Instead of translating a photo into a Van Gogh, I built a GAN to teleport high-content cell imaging between labs and seasons, removing batch effects from the data.

DeepMind

Intern
Sep 2021 - Dec 2021
I worked with the AlphaFold team to translate structural representations into functional predictions, the closest I have come to working with Nobel laureates.

Uber

Software Engineer Intern, Machine Learning
May 2017 - Aug 2017
I built a sequence model that fused sensor data, gyroscope, GPS, and Wi-Fi to infer Uber Eats delivery events and won first place at Uber's first internal ML poster session.
Software Engineering Intern, Mobile
May 2016 - Aug 2016
I built a web forensics tool that synchronized mobile UI test logs with video, then posted error logs and screenshots to failing code changes. I should have learned more about product management.

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

Publications (*equal contribution)

Foundation models for discovery and exploration in chemical space

arXiv (2025)
Alexius Wadell, Anoushka Bhutani, Victor Azumah, Austin R. Ellis-Mohr, Andrew J. Stier, Kareem Hegazy, Alexander Brace, Hancheng Zhao, Celia Kelly, Anuj K. Nayak, Yuhan Chen, Dimitrios Simatos, Hongyi Lin, Murali Emani, Venkatram Vishwanath, Kevin Gering, Melisa Alkan, Tom Gibbs, Jack Wells, Wesley W. Qian, Richard C. Gerkin, Benjamin Amorelli, Alexander B. Wiltschko, Lav R. Varshney, Bharath Ramsundar, Karthik Duraisamy, Michael W. Mahoney, Arvind Ramanathan, Venkatasubramanian Viswanathan

A deep learning and digital archaeology approach for mosquito repellent discovery

Chemical Senses (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

New York Smells: a large multimodal dataset for olfaction

arXiv · project page (2025)
Ege Ozguroglu, Junbang Liang, Ruoshi Liu, Mia Chiquier, Michael DeTienne, Wesley W. Qian, Alexandra Horowitz, Andrew Owens, Carl Vondrick

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 principal odor map unifies diverse tasks in human olfactory perception

Science (2023)
Brian K. Lee*, Emily J. Mayhew*, Benjamin Sanchez-Lengeling, Jennifer N. Wei, Wesley W. Qian, Kelsie A. Little, Matthew Andres, Britney B. Nguyen, Theresa Moloy, Jacob Yasonik, Jane K. Parker, Richard C. Gerkin, Joel D. Mainland, 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

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

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

Energy-inspired molecular conformation optimization

ICLR (2022)
Jiaqi Guan*, Wesley W. Qian*, Qiang Liu, Wei-Ying Ma, Jianzhu Ma, Jian Peng

ECNet is an evolutionary context-integrated deep learning framework for protein engineering

Nature Communications (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

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

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

Integrating deep neural networks and symbolic inference for organic reactivity prediction

ChemRxiv (2020) · presented at ACS National Meeting (2021)
Wesley W. Qian*, Nathan T. Russell*, Claire L. W. Simons, Yunan Luo, Martin D. Burke, Jian Peng

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