Alejandro A. Granados, Ph.D.
Principal Data Scientist | Computational Biology | AI Systems
I build production AI systems for biological discovery—pipelines that biologists use daily, benchmarked against human expert performance.
Current Work
At Calico Life Sciences, I lead computational efforts across five drug programs, including two in Phase II clinical trials. My focus is designing LLM-agent pipelines that combine deterministic bioinformatics with language model reasoning—systems that have processed hundreds of datasets, generated novel hypotheses, and accelerated discovery timelines from weeks to hours.
Background
- 2006: Genomics BS in Mexico—one of few programs worldwide
- 2012: PhD at Imperial College London—microscopy, yeast, information theory
- 2018: Postdoc at Caltech with Michael Elowitz—mammalian synthetic biology, signaling pathway architecture
- 2021: Chan Zuckerberg Biohub—building single-cell atlases
- 2023: Calico—translational data science, drug development, AI systems
Selected Publications
Cell (2024): Zebrahub — Lead computational biologist for multimodal zebrafish developmental atlas; 500k cells; open-source resource
Cell Genomics (2024): Combinatorial expression motifs — Mapping 1,200+ signaling pathway configurations across cell types
Science (2022): Tabula Sapiens — Contributing to the human cell atlas
Science (2018): MEMOIR lineage recording — Caltech work on DNA-based recording of cell histories
Beyond Science
When I’m not building AI systems, I produce electronic music as Trascrypt—experimental sounds somewhere between ambient and industrial.