I'm Yaoyu Yang. I am an engineer, researcher, and entrepreneur. I am the Founder and CEO of Cypher, a software startup leveraging AI to supercharge scientific productivity. Before Cypher, I worked at Ginkgo Bioworks as a Principal Software Engineer with the aim of making biology easier to engineer through software. I joined Ginkgo in early 2017 as a Senior Software Engineer and was promoted to Principal Software Engineer via a Redwood Award in 2021! My work at Ginkgo focused on building innovative software solutions that power Ginkgo's Foundry Platform and provide well-abstracted interfaces to enable users of the Foundry Platform to leverage its state-of-the-art capabilities to accomplish ambitious Cell Engineering projects.

I obtained my Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Washington at 2016, where I worked on synthetic biology and lab automation in the Klavins Lab. My Ph.D. thesis was titled Design, Construction, and Validation of Dynamic Gene Circuits in Yeast. I built novel synthetic gene circuits in yeast. I also built over 20 high quality, reproducible build and test workflows in the Aquarium lab operating system, a software-enabled human-in-the-loop automation platform invented in the Klavins Lab. I was a founding member of UW Biofabrication Center (UW BIOFAB), a cloud lab service powered by Aquarium.

Outside work, I enjoy reading, making cool apps, investing, and blogging. Follow me on X (formerly Twitter) for latest updates.