About

I'm Gully — named after a character in a 1950s pulp sci-fi novel, The Stars My Destination.

I studied physics at Imperial College London, drawn to the mathematical precision of physical models. The certainty was comforting — conservation laws, fundamental constants, solid ground.

Then I pivoted to neuroscience, and never felt that secure about my knowledge again. The brain is messy, complex, heterogeneous. I found the best way to make sense of it was to build databases and tools — to model not neurons, but the concepts my colleagues used to describe them.

This led me to USC's Information Sciences Institute, where I collaborated with experts in NLP, knowledge representation, and semantic web technologies. My role was to translate between domains — to find the common structure underlying scientific knowledge.

Then, I pivoted from academia to industry by joining the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative in 2018. Since then, I worked on tools to read the scientific literature, rare disease patient screening, and more recently agentic approaches to biocuration - converting the complex messy reality you find out there in the world into something concrete, usable, and powerful.

Now I work at the intersection of AI and science, building tools to help researchers accelerate their work. It's the fulfillment of a career spent asking: how do we transform information into understanding?

Beyond work, My universe is joyfully filled with being a proud husband and father. I think about truth and epistemology at Ars Veritatis (with a podcast to make the ideas more accessible here: https://ars-veritatis.podbean.com/). I write poetry and use AI to translate them into music (under the artistic name 'Gulzarooster'). I play (and write) tabletop RPGs using the excellent Mythras system.

I believe the world can't wait for us to solve the problems we face.