Daehwan Kim is a computational biologist and software engineer whose genome-alignment tools - TopHat, HISAT and HISAT2 - are cited more than 78,000 times and are used by researchers worldwide to read DNA and RNA data. A former Michael L. Rosenberg Assistant Professor in the Lyda Hill Department of Bioinformatics at UT Southwestern Medical Center, he co-founded Omphalos Lifesciences, where he invented L++, a high-level programming language meant to describe living systems the way C++ describes machines. His goal is a fully programmable, simulatable virtual cell.
LatchBio is a San Francisco company building an AI-native data platform for biology. It lets scientists store, analyze, and visualize data from 40+ lab kits and instruments without writing code or managing cloud infrastructure - turning raw sequencing and experimental output into reproducible, publication-ready results. Founded in 2021 by three Berkeley dropouts, it now serves thousands of scientists at biopharmas and research labs and is positioning itself as 'the AI agent for biology data analysis.'