Jan Zheng
AI design engineer with HCI background, specializing in rapid prototypes that solve real-world problems. Builds AI-powered automation systems that help scientists and researchers streamline their workflows.
Previously built software that supported 20+ phage therapy cases in a nation-wide clinical trial.
Labspace.ai
Coverflow — inspired by Github Actions, this serverless task and data orchestration system uses a simple JSON format to create complex workflows like scraping, parsing, inferencing, database editing. This semi-agentic workflow tool powers Phage Papers, a bluesky bot posting phage papers, Coverpage, a tool for generating CVs and personal websites, and powers many data and AI summarization tasks.
Coverpage — uses Coverflow to generate and manage online CVs and personal websites. Powers sites like labspace.ai, jess.bio, and janzheng.com.
Coversheet — a tool that embeds Coverflow, which allows for formulas like Wikipedia and Pubmed search, summarizing selected cells with AI, and extracting data as grids of rows and columns inside Google Sheets from PDFs, papers, and other sources.
Other projects include threadg1rl.labspace.ai which turns papers (or any text or url) into tweets and summaries; pageshot.labspace.ai which grabs metadata about any web page, paper, or DOI, and a dozen more smaller tools.
Westmead Institute for Medical Research
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
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
nurun
Freelance Designer
Moxie Interactive
Microsoft
Lockheed Martin
Design
- Stakeholder mapping
- Requirement gathering
- Scoping and establishing roadmap
- Setting OKRs and product analytics / feedback system
- 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
- 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
- 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
Software Development
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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.
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.
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.
We received a grant to build Instill.xyz, a messaging board/forum for sharing links, papers, and peer reviewing manuscripts.
- 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.
- 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.