Jan Zheng
Jan is a full-stack product engineer with a background in product design, UX, and bioinformatics.
Previously, he designed and built tools and systems to collect and sync data across the clinical, wet lab, and bioinformatics aspects of a phage therapy clinical trial.
Currently, he's building agentic tools for researchers at labspace.ai.
Product Designer · Full-stack · Bioinformatics Engineer · AI Engineer
San Francisco, CA
About
I have over a decade of experience in user-centered product design, specializing in building full-stack prototypes. My work spans from running customer interviews, to illustrating SVGs and prototyping apps in Figma, to designing and building APIs in FastAPI then deploying on Fly.io, writing Cloudflare Workers functions, and building full-stack JS projects with frameworks like Vue, Svelte, and React.
In the last few years, I've worked on Phage Directory, a community-driven crowd-sourced phage therapy project. We've received grants from Mozilla Science, Helmsley Charitable Trust, and Grant for the web; were key partners in starting Phage Australia, an Australia-wide phage therapy clinical trial; and helped treat ~20 patients with phage therapy.
In the last year, I've been building experimental LLM tools like generative UI and LLM-driven finite state machine agents for more predictable function execution, for automating various data engineering tasks at Phage Australia.
- Open to in-person and remote work opportunities.
- ¼ product designer • ¼ full-stack dev • ¼ AI tinkerer • ¼ bioinformatics engineer.
- Spends too much time thinking about how to make interfaces that make data easier to understand.
- Tinkers with building new tools like LLMs, agents, finite-state machines, and vector databases.
- Loves to build experimental interfaces like generative UIs. LLM chat is fine, but what else is there?
- Dual citizen of US and Sweden. (Has work authorization for both US and Europe).
Experience
Westmead Institute for Medical Research
Bioinformatics Engineer
March 2022 - present · Sydney, Australia
Led data engineering efforts to collect and aggregate all clinical, wet lab, and genomics data into a single source for data analysis for Phage Australia and STAMP, an Australia-wide clinical process trial for individualized phage therapy.
- Used Google Sheets and CUE lang to design and build a fully compliant electronic case report form (eCRF) on top of REDCap, totalling 800+ questions and collecting phage, clinical, and labs details before, during, and after treatment.
- Prototyped a federated lab data tracking system that works across Google Sheets, Airtable, and JSON / document DBs, and verifies logs with Merkle hashes.
- Designed and built the Phage Australia website on top of Vercel and Sveltekit, and is powered by Airtable, Notion, and Google Sheets.
- Worked collaborated with lab members on projects like bioinformatics pipelines and generative UIs for lab data entry.
- Used LLMs for schema inferencing and data (re-)structuring
- Built an experimental data and grant analysis agent on top of LLMs / GPT-4.
Phage Directory
Co-founder · Technical co-founder
October 2017 - present · Atlanta, GA + Nomad
Phage Directory is a social enterprise that connects patients suffering from antibiotic-resistant infections patients with phages that can save their lives. We're also a community of thousands of phage researchers across 80+ countries, and we host webinars, week-long conferences, and build useful tools for microbiologists.
- Almost 60 phage alerts which led to 2 treated kids, 1 treated sea-turtle, and the Phage Australia clinical trial, which treated 16+ patients!
- Phage Directory: built with Vue 2 using Airtable as CMS, Fly.io and Cloudflare workers as API, and Vercel for deployment.
- Capsid & Tail: Our newsletter, has 1400 phage researcher subscribers and 40% open rate. Custom-built on Vue, Airtable, and launched on Mailchimp.
- Evergreen Phage Conference: Created and hosted a One-week bacteriophage conference in Olympia, WA. 200+ attendees w/ $100k+ revenue, and abstract submission, review, and full days of science talks. I built the site, handled payments, but also on-site ops, emceeing, A/V, and other tasks. I also designed and branded everything.
- Instill: A Grant for the Web project, this was created as a simple 'drop-in forum' that could be embedded in websites but also tools like Notion. Built on Sveltekit, powered by Airtable or Google Sheets, and runs on a simplified, custom auth. Originally created with the intention of using payment pointers.
- Blogalog.net: A blog and website system with features like Stripe pay-gating, sign up forms, and advanced embedding and styling. Completely powered by Notion, and built on Sveltekit, Vercel, and powered by the official and a not-so-official Notion API.
Ubiquiti Networks
Lead UX Designer, Front-end developer
2014 - 2016 · Atlanta, GA
Designed and built a support-centric community social network for Ubiquiti’s users, inspired by community forums, StackExchange, Quora, Instagram and others. Created business logic, requirements, wireframes, prototypes, and a modular, SCSS-based responsive framework. Also built front-end features using AngularJS.
nurun
Sr. UX Architect
2012 - 2014 · Atlanta, GA
Guided campaign requirements and strategy; created user flows, wireframes, and interactive protototypes for clients like Nespresso, Assurant, Gas South, and The Home Depot.
Freelance Designer
Web Development · UX Design
2011 - 2016 · Atlanta, GA
Worked for several clients including Diamax Korea, doublethedonation.com, GigaGen (DNA sequencing/annotation software), ANDP (non-profit housing initiative), LifeLine Animal Project (non-profit, no-kill shelter)
Moxie Interactive
UX Architect
2010 - 2012 · Atlanta, GA
Focused on web and mobile experiences, information architecture, and conversion funnels, for clients like Verizon Wireless, Cartoon Network, Coca-Cola, L'Oreal, and BBC America.
Microsoft
Program Manager Intern · Visual Studio Team Services
2008 - 2008 · Raleigh, NC
Lockheed Martin
Software Developer · IT Division · Social Security Agency · Part-time
2006 - 2007 · Woodlawn, MD
Education
Carnegie Mellon University
Human-Computer Interaction · Masters (MHCI) 2005 - 2009 · Pittsburgh, PA
University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Computer Science, Psychology · Bachelor of Science (BSc) 2006-09 - 2010-05 · Catonsville, MD
Skills
Design
I'm a multi-disciplinary designer with experience ranging from user-centered UX research, wireframing and building Figma prototypes, and illustrating vector logos, to designing information/data architectures, building full-stack prototypes, and making more accessible APIs for better DX.
FigmaIllustratorInDesignUser-Centered DesignUX ResearchCustomer DiscoveryAPI Design
Product Design & Management
Working with clients, startups, and projects to take ideas through the iterative design and prototyping stages.
- Stakeholder mapping
- Requirement gathering
- Scoping and establishing roadmap
- Setting OKRs and product analytics / feedback system
User-centered designProduct Management
UX Research · Customer Discovery
I've done user-centered design-style research for clients like Coca Cola, and performed lean startup-stylecustomer discovery for my own startup.
- Interviewed Ubiquiti users on how to best serve support/troubleshooting needs
- Talked to and worked with hundreds of biologists to understand the drug discovery and phage therapy software tooling landscape
User-centered designCustomer interviewsDiary studiesLean startup
Prototyping
Rapidly iterating from idea to paper to wireframes and clickable prototypes, based on analytics, user interviews, and customer/team feedback.
- Going from Idea → Paper → Wireframes → Figma prototypes
- Creating components and design systems in Figma
- Building and iterating on component libraries in Svelte, CSS/SCSS, and Tailwind
FigmaIllustrator
Full-stack Prototyping
Some experiences like LLM-driven generative UIs and APIs are hard to design on paper or in Figma.
- Rapidly iterating FastAPI endpoints for LLM and real or fake data, and testing using RESTFox
- Prototyping RAG, agent, and other systems with Python and JS
- Building rapid prototype (e.g. skipping type safety & unit tests) apps in Sveltekit
API designGen UIExperimental User flowsCRUD Apps
Software Development
Once I have an outline of an idea, I'll move straight to code, to build a prototype or MVP. Many of the projects I build come from direct project, community, customer, or collaborator needs. Some are community asks or product needs; others are just for fun — since I'm an indie hacker / builder at heart!
Front-end Development
Much of my dev work stems from Phage Directory's needs to build tools for the community. I'm an indie hacker at heart so here's a small slice of projects:
- Phage Directory: a directory of phage researchers and resources and custom-built blog running on Airtable
- Evergreen: a science conference website with Stripe integration and LLM-assisted abstract submission
- Blogalog.net: A blogging and site hosting system on Vercel and powered by Notion
JS/TSPythonSvelteSvelteKitVueNuxtReactNext.jsTailwindCSS/SCSSNodeVite
API Design
I've designed and built several services with API endpoints mostly for internal use, like data services on top of Cloudflare, Apps Scripts, and wrappers around getting/posting data to Airtable and Notion.
- Built and deployed a service for accessing multiple LLMs and RAG endpoint in Python, on Fly.io
- Built a system to merge and cache/invalidate data from several APIs like Notion, Airtable, Google Sheets and RAG, to serve front-ends
FastAPICloudflare StackNode.jsExpressHono
Internal Tools
Many tools I've built simplify lots of tasks, like having the ability to use Airtable and Notion as a CMS for instantly editing websites, and logging signups to Sheets.
- Built a wrapper around Notion/Airtable/Google Sheets APIs to read and write data, as a CMS suite (which frees us from hefty headless CMS prices)
- Built interfaces like reviewing research papers, micro-comments systems, etc. using Sveltekit/Retool/D1/Airtable and other tools
- Built a CLI to make backing up data w/ rclone simpler
VercelCloudflare StackFly.ioMongoDBCouchDBSQLrcloneCLIRetoolAirtable
AI Engineering
Building experimental tools with LLMS.
- Experimenting with embeddings, vector databases and RAG for data retrieval
- Building a tool that structures lab data and research papers into searchable data
- Building a 'semi-stochastic' agent that uses composable building blocks for function calling
- Built a GPT that acts as a note taker and stores + structures data
ClaudeGPT-4 APILangChainLlamaindexCloudflare AIVercel AI SDKVarious RAG / Vector Pipelines
Bioinformatics Engineering
At Phage Australia, I set up many systems for collecting, storing, and analyzing data around (ELT/ETL) for our phage therapy clinical trial. Since researchers prefer spreadsheets, the system reads/loads into Google Sheets instead of traditional ELT software.
- Built an 800+ question electronic case report form with REDCap.
- Used LLMs to structure and store unsanitized data.
- Built a system on R2 that acts as a data lake/house for any lab data, including anonymized clinical data, genomics data, and lab results.
Node.jspythonCloudflare R2, D1, WorkersduckdbLLmsREDCapELT/ETL pipelines
Publications
Plymoth, M., Lynch, S. A., Khatami, A. K., Sinclair, H. A., Sacher, J. C., Zheng, J., Lin, R. C. Y., & Iredell, J. R. (2023). Attitudes to phage therapy among Australian infectious diseases physicians [Preprint]. medRxiv. https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.07.03.23292153
Sacher, J. C., Zheng, J., & Lin, R. C. (2022). Data to Power Precision Phage Therapy: A Look at the Phage Directory–Phage Australia Partnership. PHAGE: Therapy, Applications, and Research, 3(2), 112-115. DOI: 10.1089/phage.2022.29030.jcs
Sacher, J. C., & Zheng, J. (2021). inPhocus: “State of Phage” Survey Highlights Widespread Diverse Phage Isolation and Research in 40+ Countries. PHAGE: Therapy, Applications, and Research, 2(4), 156-169. DOI: 10.1089/phage.2021.29023.jcs
Lin, R. C., Sacher, J. C., Ceyssens, P. J., Zheng, J., Khalid, A., Iredell, J. R., & Network, T. A. P. B. (2021). Phage Biobank: Present Challenges and Future Perspectives. Current Opinion in Biotechnology, 68, 221-230. DOI: 10.1016/j.copbio.2020.12.018.
McCallin, S., Sacher, J. C., Zheng, J., & Chan, B. K. (2019). Current state of compassionate phage therapy. Viruses, 11(4), 343. DOI: 10.3390/v11040343.
Sacher, J. C., Zheng, J., & McCallin, S. (2019) Sourcing Phages for Compassionate Use. Microbiology Australia 40(1) 24-27. DOI: 10.1071/MA19012.
Sacher J. C., Zheng J. (2019) Phage Therapy Collaboration and Compassionate Use. In: Harper D., Abedon S., Burrowes B., McConville M. (eds) Bacteriophages: Biology, Technology, Therapy. Springer, Cham.
Grant Awards
Mozilla Science Mini Grants
2019 ·
Mozilla
We received two grants for Mozilla: (1) the first one for understanding phage researchers' biobanking needs and build a public database for phage labs, and (2) a collaboration with Phages for Global Health to create a public phage microbiology resource aimed at under-resourced labs and universities.
Grant for the Web
2021 ·
Interledger Foundation
We received a grant to build Instill.xyz, a messaging board/forum for sharing links, papers, and peer reviewing manuscripts.
Interests
AI & ML
Protein Language ModelsAI AgentsGenerative InterfacesGenerated schemas and data extractionMaking fine-tuning as easy as using ExcelHands-free × Ubiquitous Interfaces
Biotech
Bioinformatics × AI × Data EngineeringProtein Language ModelsTechbio Tool DevelopmentPhage Therapy
Outdoor Activities
HikingCyclingHorseback Riding
Languages
English
Native speaker
Swedish
Conversational
Mandarin
Conversational
Board & Advisory roles
Full Radius Dance
Board Member
2019 – 2022
Full Radius Dance is a dance company that combines 'traditional' modern dance with techniques that let dancers perform with dancer with physical disabilities.
- Supported technical aspects like collecting payments of new events.
- Considered building a platform for FRD to teach the dance technique during COVID-19, as an online wiki / technique manual.
- Previously performed as a dancer for one of FRD's events, the Modern Atlanta Dance Festival.
Volunteer Experience
American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA)
Rise Up! Design Mentor
2020
The program helped people who wanted to transition into design and UX from other fields.
- Held bi-weekly mentorship meetings with a graphic designer who worked at a local newspaper. Showed her career paths and helped optimize her entry into UX. She eventually landed a UX job at Amazon Echo.