Education
California Institute of Technology (Caltech), CA, USA
Ph.D.
Sep 2019 – Mar 2024
Advised by Prof. Lior Pachter (GPA 4.0/4)
- Divisions: Biology and Biological Engineering & Computing and Mathematical Sciences
- Ph.D. Thesis Defense: https://youtu.be/mzCOakJT-BU
Leiden University, The Netherlands
B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Molecular Genetics and Biotechnology
Sep 2014 – Aug 2019
GPA: 3.8/4 (B.Sc.) and 4.0/4 cum laude (M.Sc.)
- M.Sc. extracurriculars: Leiden Leadership Program (competitive honors program focused on interdisciplinary leadership and business strategy)
- B.Sc. extracurriculars: Beta & Life Science Honors College; Minor: Disease Signaling & Drug Targets
Work Experience
Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, MA, USA
Independent Postdoctoral Fellow
Sep 2024 – ongoing
Advisor: Prof. Pardis Sabeti
- Joint affiliation with Harvard University, Mass General Brigham, and FutureHouse.
- Simultaneously holding the FutureHouse AI-for-Science Fellowship and the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center Fellowship.
- Co-leading AI strategy for the $100M MacArthur-award Sentinel Project. Developing point-of-care AI systems by fine-tuning small LLMs on clinical data and integrating agents and RAG to enable real-time infectious disease detection. Establishing infrastructure partnerships with Google and NVIDIA for deployment in Nigeria and Sierra Leone.
- Authored a $2M grant from the Ellison Medical Institute (EMI) (currently in $100k pilot). Facilitated long-term contractual agreements between Broad and EMI in <1 month. Recruited and onboarded a Senior Bioinformatics Engineer to build sequencing data analysis agents for viral detection.
- Data Analysis Co-Lead for a major data generation center within the NIH Human Virome Program.
Caltech, CA, USA
Ph.D. Candidate
Sep 2019 – Aug 2024
Advisor: Prof. Lior Pachter
- Created gget, a widely used open-source tool for querying genomic databases (e.g. Ensembl) and simplifying complex bioinformatics workflows (e.g. AlphaFold2), resulting in a $20k Prototype Fund Award and two publications in Bioinformatics.
- gget was featured in the Prototype Fund "open-source software benefiting society" short film series and podcast.
- Engineered C++ algorithms kallisto and bustools for viral RNA detection at single-cell resolution, featured on the cover of Nature Biotechnology (cover release: Jan 2026).
- Led transcriptomic analysis for the first-in-human CAR T prostate cancer trial in collaboration with Prof. Saul Priceman, identifying key resistance mechanisms published in Nature Medicine.
- Inventor on two pending patents (US App. 18/972,306; 19/317,823) for cancer variant and viral detection methods.
Mimetas BV, Leiden, The Netherlands
R&D Intern (Organoids)
Jan – Jul 2019
- Developed 3D vascularized cerebral organoid assays on the proprietary OrganoPlate microfluidic platform for high-throughput drug safety evaluation and discovery.
- Established robust protocols for iPSC/hESC differentiation and HUVEC co-culture, and validated key structural and functional hallmarks of vascularized human cerebral tissue (research report awarded highest distinction).
Caltech, Pasadena, CA
Graduate Researcher (Biosensors)
Apr – Dec 2018
Advisor: Prof. Henry Lester
- Engineered and optimized novel fluorescent biosensors for the real-time visualization of Fluoxetine (Prozac) at subcellular resolution.
- Validated sensor performance using protein purification, confocal imaging, and electrophysiology; conducted in vivo AAV mouse surgeries. Awarded Leiden University Best M.Sc. Thesis 2019.
Honors Academy, Leiden University, The Netherlands
Beta & Life Science Representative
Nov 2015 – Apr 2018
- Promoted to Beta & Life Science representative acting as a strategic liaison between academic divisions and the university administration.
- Organized large-scale events for 100+ stakeholders and provided mentorship to incoming honors students.
Biofrontera Bioscience GmbH, Leverkusen, Germany
Clinical Research Intern (Formulation Science)
Jul – Aug 2017
- Designed, prototyped, and evaluated novel cosmetic product formulations targeting sensitive skin indications for clinical development.
Leiden University Medical Centre (LUMC), The Netherlands
Undergraduate Researcher (Neuroscience)
Feb – Aug 2017
- Conducted a pre-clinical study on Familial Hemiplegic Migraine, utilizing optogenetics and electrophysiology to assess signal transduction changes in cortical networks.
- Performed quantitative analysis of behavioral and EEG data to validate disease models.
Selected Publications
Laura Luebbert†, et al. (2025). "Pandemic-Potential Viruses are a Blind Spot for Frontier Open-Source LLMs." NeurIPS GenAI4Health (Oral Presentation and Award Candidate). doi.org/10.64898/2025.12.04.25341642
Laura Luebbert†, et al. (2025). "Efficient and accurate detection of viral sequences at single-cell resolution reveals novel viruses perturbing host gene expression." Nature Biotechnology (Jan 2026 cover). doi:10.1038/s41587-025-02614-y
IGVF Consortium. (2024). "Deciphering the impact of genomic variation on function." Nature. doi:10.1038/s41586-024-07510-0
Tanya B Dorff, M Suzette Blanchard, Lauren N Adkins, Laura Luebbert, et al. (2024). "PSCA-CAR T cell therapy in metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer: a phase 1 trial." Nature Medicine. doi:10.1038/s41591-024-02979-8
Laura Luebbert, Lior Pachter. (2023). "Efficient querying of genomic reference databases with gget." Bioinformatics. doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btac836
Laura Luebbert*, Chi Hoang*‡, et al. (2023). "Fast and scalable querying of eukaryotic linear motifs with gget elm." Bioinformatics. doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btae095
†Corresponding author *Co-first author ‡Mentored student
Technical Skills
(Single-cell) RNA sequencing and clinical data analysis, ML model development/evaluation (PyTorch/PyTorch Lightning), LLM evaluation/prompt engineering (ollama, vLLM), Finetuning LLMs for Agentic Systems (SFT/RL), AI for healthcare, benchmark design, API/Python package development, cloud & containerized deployment (AWS, GCP/Vertex AI, Docker, Terra), CI/CD, documentation
Languages: Python, Bash/CLI, Git/GitHub, C++, R, SQL, LaTeX
Languages
German (native bilingual), Catalan (native bilingual), English (full professional), Dutch (full professional), Spanish (advanced)
Mentorship & Leadership
Mentored Caltech SURF/WAVE Fellows, high-school students, PhD students, and senior staff on computational biology and software engineering projects. Served as Head TA for Introduction to Neuroscience two years in a row, and organized and built Caltech's gamified virtual graduate recruitment program during the COVID-19 pandemic.