I’m now working at Janssen Pharmaceuticals (a Johnson and Johnson company) as a machine learning scientist for drug discovery. So, what that means is that I’m using state of the art techniques in machine learning and trying to use them to help discover new drugs with the right properties. I just finished my second week and am planning on working on a reinforcement learning project already!

I’m still learning what the bigger goals are and what the overarching plan is directing our research. And well I’m not really a chemistry or biology expert in any way so I’m getting up to speed on a lot of that. Thankfully my boss has been able to explain everything I need to know so far. So, I’ll try and keep the blog updated.

As far as Janssen itself, I’m liking that I get to work one day a week at home and that I get free access to a bunch of museums like MOMA in NYC. One downside is that the 16 hr of volunteer time they give you off you can only take it off in 8 hour increments and it doesn’t accrue. So, it is going to be a bit harder to take advantage of this benefit than I thought. Also, the health insurance options don’t seem to be as good as I was expecting, especially for a pharma company.

A quick edit. I noticed I haven’t posted here in more than a year! Well my last year was a crazy busy period due to my previous job at Raytheon BBN. While working there I got to do a variety of research on about five different proposals and worked on two different programs. So, hopefully this new job will be a less stressful and I’ll have more time to post here.