Jordan M. Sorokin
About
Principal Researcher
I'm a principal researcher with nearly two decades of research spanning the wet lab and the computer. I currently work as a Principal Researcher at Amae Health, applying machine learning and data science to hard problems in human health.
How I got here
My path into science started at the University of Pennsylvania, where I studied how economic upheaval shapes mood and life satisfaction at the Center for Positive Psychology, and later measured the effects of chemotherapy on whole-brain metabolism using PET/CT imaging — work that became my first peer-reviewed publication. A summer at the Salk Institute pulled me toward neurons and circuits, and I never really left.
I earned my PhD in Neuroscience at Stanford in the Huguenard Lab, studying absence epilepsy — a form of seizure that arises from the dialogue between the thalamus and the cortex. Combining electrophysiology, optogenetics, and applied mathematics, my dissertation uncovered pre-seizure neural signatures that predict when a seizure will begin, and showed how the same circuit can both initiate and abort seizures in real time. That research appeared in Neuron, Science, and the Journal of Neuroscience, supported by an NIH F31 predoctoral grant.
From studying biology to engineering it
After graduate school, I moved from studying biology to engineering it. At Herophilus I built machine-learning models across biological domains and co-led disease programs, turning high-content imaging data into decisions. At Recursion I worked as a staff data scientist in computational biology, developing representation-learning models for transcriptomics and helping steer scientific strategy inside one of the largest industrialized drug-discovery platforms in the world.
Across all of it, a few things stay constant: a conviction that technology should accelerate real science rather than decorate it, a preference for software that is scalable and durable, and a genuine enjoyment of working across disciplines — sitting between biologists, engineers, and mathematicians and helping them understand one another.
Outside the lab
I serve on the Arts and Culture Board for the City of Fort Collins, make music (some of it lives on SoundCloud), and mentor scientists finding their footing at the boundary of biology and computation. I speak English and Spanish.