Marissa Saunders

Throughout her career, Marissa Saunders has used artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to turn scientific data into meaningful insights. She is currently a Senior Director of Data Science at Recursion, a company leveraging AI, automation, high-dimensional data, and a “bilingual” team of life science and technology experts to decode biology to radically improve lives. In this role, she leads teams that sit at the interface between deep learning and drug discovery program teams. These teams are designing and arranging data science and experimental modules into seamless end-to-end processes that enable us to make unbiased decisions about which therapeutic programs to advance. Marissa guides teams in continually increasing the efficiency of these processes, improving decision-making and optimizing for the body of biological data that they are curating along the way.

Prior to Recursion, Marissa worked in the edtech space, using language models to develop a taxonomy of skills, and was also a big-data data-science consultant, working in fields ranging from biotech to video games.

She received her PhD in Chemistry from the University of Chicago, focusing on understanding how protein movement can be correlated with function, and did a post doc at the University of Utah in a structural biology lab, turning cryoEm images into protein structures and relating these structures to protein function.

Outside of work, she enjoys building puzzles and playing games with her amazing husband and 11-year old son, attempting to train her 75+ pound dog, gardening, and Muay Thai kickboxing.