Brendan Griffen

CTO & co-founder

A Cardiovascular Startup (Stealth)

Hi. I’m Brendan, a computational astrophysicist by training with core interests in biology, engineering and computer science based between San Francisco, California and Brisbane, Australia. I’m passionate about data driven decision making and using technology to better understand where we come from, how we live, and where we are going.

I’m currently CTO and co-founder of a (soon to be announced) startup focused on reversing heart failure, deploying complex in silico and in vitro systems at the intersection of computer science, robotics, tissue engineering, immunology and stem cell biology.

I am the Project Lead on the Caterpillar Project, a large computational galaxy formation suite at MIT focusing on the origin and evolution of the Milky Way. I am also a project collaborator on the more general galaxy formation project of Illustris at Harvard.

Interests

Bioinformatics
Astrophysics
Digital Humanities
Privacy & Security
National Parks

Education

Postdoctoral Research Fellow, 2016
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
PhD in Computational Astrophysics, 2012
University of Queensland
Masters in Physics (Honours), 2007
University of Queensland
Bachelor of Science (Physics | Math), 2006
University of Queensland

Brief History

CTO & co-founder

A Cardiovascular Startup (Stealth)

Feb 2020 – Present San Francisco, California, USA | Brisbane, Australia

Deploying the full force of computer science, robotics, bioengineering and data intelligence to reverse heart failure.

CTO & co-founder

Scaled Biolabs Inc.

Nov 2016 – Feb 2020 San Francisco, California, USA

Working at the frontier of microfluidics, automation, and machine learning. Providing full-stack integration of hardware, wetware and software for high-throughput, high-detail biology.

Areas include:
► computer vision, image prcessing, data wrangling
► full stack tools for creating and executing digital protocols
► distributed supervised and unsupervised machine learning models
► multi-dimensional data optimization, processing and statistical modeling
► hardware automation including microfluidic integration

Additional support in marketing, sales, legal and everything else that powers an early stage company (all heavily data driven). Graduate company of Indie Bio (batch 4), the world’s largest biotech accelerator.

Postdoctoral Fellow

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Oct 2012 – Nov 2016 Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

Using computational physics to better understand galaxy evolution, non-linear structure formation, and the early Universe.

Areas include:
► non-linear dynamics, radiative transfer and N-body computation
► petascale computing and large scale analytics
► predictive modeling of billions of N-dimensional data points
► development of novel computational algorithms and analysis pipelines
► 12 published scientific papers, $200k in development grants awarded
► 10+ million CPU hours awarded on national supercomputing facilities
► The Caterpillar Project leader at MIT.
► A Illustris Project collaborator at Harvard.