Jan Zheng, MHCI
Product Designer · Full-stack · Bioinformatics Engineer · AI Engineer
San Francisco, CA
I have over a decade of experience in user-centered product design, specializing in building full-stack prototypes. My work spans from running customer interviews, to illustrating SVGs and prototyping apps in Figma, to designing and building APIs in FastAPI then deploying on Fly.io, writing Cloudflare Workers functions, and building full-stack JS projects with frameworks like Vue, Svelte, and React.
In the last few years, I've worked on Phage Directory, a community-driven crowd-sourced phage therapy project. We've received grants from Mozilla Science, Helmsley Charitable Trust, and Grant for the web; were key partners in starting Phage Australia, an Australia-wide phage therapy clinical trial; and helped treat ~20 patients with phage therapy.
In the last year, I've been building experimental LLM tools like generative UI and LLM-driven finite state machine agents for more predictable function execution, for automating various data engineering tasks at Phage Australia.
- Open to in-person and remote work opportunities.
- ¼ product designer • ¼ full-stack dev • ¼ AI tinkerer • ¼ bioinformatics engineer.
- Spends too much time thinking about how to make interfaces that make data easier to understand.
- Tinkers with building new tools like LLMs, agents, finite-state machines, and vector databases.
- Loves to build experimental interfaces like generative UIs. LLM chat is fine, but what else is there?
- Dual citizen of US and Sweden. (Has work authorization for both US and Europe).
- 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.
- 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.
- 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
- 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.
- 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.