To fulfill our mission to fully automate drug discovery, we build our research program around a set of principles we value, which, over time, for better or for worse, are going to shape who we are in academia.

🍷 Taste over (excessive) hard work. In this era, we believe that picking the right tree is far more impactful than barking hard. If you find yourself stressfully working long hours, you are probably not using the right tool or tackling the problem from the right angle. Although we welcome researchers at all life stages to join us, statistically, most entered academia during what can be colloquially described as the best years of one’s life, which should not be wasted solely on work. We also do not believe in full-time in-person work—use our office for meetings, socializing, and impromptu discussions, but do not feel obligated to stay in when you need focus time. In sum, we are progress-driven—as long as you are making expected progress, we do not care about where or when you did the amazing work to make it happen. Finally, your wellbeing is the single most important thing within the lab; we are always open to chat as colleagues and hopefully friends, and the university has abundant resources to support you as well.

🛠️ Tools over subject matters. We are not fishermen; we are fishing rod manufacturers. We talk to fishermen about their needs to catch specific types of fish, to customize rods accordingly; we work with the fishing department; heck, we might even cast our rods to try to catch a fish or two; but we are still rod manufacturers by heart, since fish may come and go, but people always need rods, if that makes sense.

🤝 Collaboration over competition. On the landscape of problems waiting to be solved, we find unvisited corners, rather than crowded space—competing in terms of marginal performance or timeline is not helpful for us as a field. We always welcome collaborations with labs with complementary strengths or focuses. To that end, we go to as many relevant conferences as our time and finances allow. Internally, we also encourage group-wide collaboration on every project, where whoever contributed time longer than a cup of coffee (a single espresso, to be exact) should be at least invited for authorship. Nevertheless, co-first authorship within our group is discouraged (unless every party is absolutely certain), as it blurs the line of ownership.

đź’¬ Conversation over presentation. Tracing back to The Republic and The Analects, the most influential ideas in human history have almost always been documented as conversations. While probably not of the same significance, our lab, first and foremost, is a conversation club. We do not have formal, centralized systems for note-taking and we do not waste time polishing manicured slides for lab meetings. Instead, we share our ideas and findings in real time via Slack, where we prepare rigorous, publication-quality figures, which will be the only material needed for all our meetings, and later directly incorporated into writings. We also encourage the summary of informal discussions among colleagues to be documented in a public channel, for future reference. In addition, with the help of agents (like @claude), most, if not all, computational experiments can be carried out via Slack as well.

In a sense, publications should too be thought of as a conversation with fellow scholars in our field. To that end, we release preprints early and openly to solicit feedback, while we also acknowledge the value of a peer-reviewed (and preferably high-impact) paper as career currency.