Alexander Rives
Researcher · Founder
Now Head of Science, leading AI and biology through Biohub, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative
Latest on AI4S.fyiInterview · Oct 20Biohub's Alex Rives: virtual cells lack measurement first, models secondAccount links back to biohub.org · Avatar from their X account, taken 2026-10-01
Affiliations
Current
- Head of Science, leading AI and biology through Biohub · Chan Zuckerberg Initiative
Previous
- Founder and chief scientist · EvolutionaryScale
Also named in the companies' announcements: Meta / FAIR
Current roles come from these dated records, not from the bio below. Each links the page it was read from.
About
Alexander Rives is head of science at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, leading its AI and biology work through Biohub, which EvolutionaryScale's team joined; he was a founder and chief scientist of EvolutionaryScale. He started and led the Evolutionary Scale Modeling (ESM) project on protein language models at Meta's AI research lab. He is an assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT and a core member of the Broad Institute, and holds a bachelor's degree in philosophy and biology from Yale and a doctorate in computer science from NYU.
Read on 2026-09-29; for current roles see Affiliations above. Read at: chanzuckerberg.com ↗ · engineering.mit.edu ↗ · techcrunch.com ↗
Selected work
- Biological structure and function emerge from scaling unsupervised learning to 250 million protein sequences ↗
A protein language model trained on 250 million sequences, whose representations carry structural and functional information.
Also on this record: Joshua Meier, Tom Sercu
Each byline was read on the paper itself. Only people on this record are named, not the full author list, and a shared byline does not say who did which part.
Founded
EvolutionaryScaleProtein design · 2023 · 1 round on record · Seed more than $142 millionBackground: Meta FAIR (ESM team) (as the company's own announcements put it)
Co-founders: Tom Sercu, Sal Candido
Backed byNat FriedmanDaniel GrossLux Capital
Interviews
On the timeline
- 2026-10-07Biohub, the US DOE and NIH, and Google DeepMind, Isomorphic Labs and Meta commit $1.8B to open data for virtual-cell models
- 2025-11-06EvolutionaryScale, the team behind the ESM3 protein model, joins Chan Zuckerberg's Biohub
- 2024-06-25EvolutionaryScale's ESM3 protein model writes a green fluorescent protein only 58% identical to any known one, and in the lab it glows about as brightly as natural GFP
Named in commentary
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