Hector Zenil

Founder & Lab Leader, Oxford Immune Algorithmics

Role: Alumni Associate

Site: CDL-Oxford

Stream: Artificial Intelligence

Hector Zenil has held academic and industry positions in seven countries. Hector contributed some of the code of Wolfram|Alpha, the AI engine behind Apple’s Siri and Alexa, that enables them to answer factual questions.

Over the last 10 years, he has been associated with the UK’s Golden Triangle, the universities of Oxford (Kellogg College – Structural Biology Group, Department of Computer Science), and Cambridge (Machine Learning Group, Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology), The Alan Turing Institute, the UK’s national institute for data science and AI, supported by the ONR/U.S. Navy, DoD and based at the British Library in London, and the Center for Molecular Medicine (and SciLifeLab) at the Karolinska Institute (the institution that awards the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in Stockholm, Sweden). He has held senior staff and faculty positions in these institutions, running the gamut from assistant professor, senior researcher, principal investigator, to lab leader, as well as serving as an advisor to policy making for institutions like the OECD (on AI for Scientific Discovery).

In 2018, Hector founded Oxford Immune Algorithmics, an award-winning deep biotech spinout from the University of Oxford, graduated from CDL (U.S. and Canada) and SpinLab (Germany), operating multi-nationally (UK, Canada, US, India, UAE, Bangladesh) that has raised about USD$8M to transform medicine and health care by using the power of artificial general intelligence (AGI) to learn from and monitor each individual person’s immune system.

Hector has published over 120 peer-reviewed papers and eight books, some in the top journals in the areas of physics, computer science, computational intelligence, molecular biology, complexity science, and finance, including the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Nature Communications, Physica A, Physical Review E, Nature Methods, Bioinformatics, Nature Machine Intelligence, Nucleic Research Acids, among others.