PhD Researcher & Research Engineer: Navigating the AI x Biology Frontier

Welcome to my digital lab notebook and reflection space.

For those who have been following my work, you know I wear two hats: I am a PhD Researcher at the intersection of geometric deep learning and cancer genomics, and a Research Engineer building the infrastructure that makes this science possible.

This blog isn't just about code snippets or paper summaries (though there will be plenty of that). It’s about the reality of the PhD life: the work, the life-as-work, the work-as-life, and the elusive search for balance in a field that never sleeps.

Work-as-Life: The Obsession

In the "AI for Science" world, work often feels like life. When you are training a model that could potentially surface a new mechanistic insight into cellular topology, it’s hard to "clock out" at 5 PM. The cells don't stop dividing, and the GPU clusters don't stop humming.

For me, research engineering is the bridge. It’s what allows a PhD researcher to move from "it works on my machine" to "it works for the community." But this comes with a cost—the constant mental load of maintaining both scientific rigor and engineering robustness.

Life-as-Work: The Balance

The cliché is that PhD students have no life. The reality is more nuanced: our life becomes the work. We find beauty in a well-structured repository and thrill in a loss curve that finally converges.

But I’ve learned that the best research engineering doesn't happen during the 14th hour of a coding marathon. It happens when you step away. It happens during a walk through Heidelberg, or while reading a book that has nothing to do with linear algebra.

Research Engineering in AI x Biology

My goal for this blog is to share the "behind the scenes" of this hybrid identity:

• The Technical: How we scale GNNs to millions of nodes.
• The Philosophical: Why the "representational gap" in biology is the most interesting problem in AI.
• The Personal: How to maintain a sense of self while pursuing a PhD in a high-pressure environment.

Whether you're a fellow PhD student, an engineer interested in biology, or just a curious bystander, I hope you find something here that resonates.

Tags: life, PhD, research engineering, balance