Pavel Yakovlev

I’m Pavel. I have a PhD in molecular biology, and I develop biological drugs for cancer, autoimmune diseases, and inherited genetic disorders in Russia. I sincerely hope you never have to encounter any of them—but if you do, this field is not as bleak as it may seem.

I entered the industry in 2012 as a bioinformatics intern and, over the next eight years, worked my way up to Vice President of Novel Product Development, gradually moving away from the IT side and deeper into biology. Even so, I remain a firm believer that drug development should be an engineering discipline, not a process of trial and error. We are slowly moving from “let’s try it and see what happens” to “let’s design the experiment properly and calculate everything we can before running expensive experiments.”

I also teach. It began as a compulsory part of graduate school and somehow never stopped: Academic University of the Russian Academy of Sciences, ITMO, St Petersburg University, MIPT, and HSE University, where I am the academic director of the master’s programme in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics. Then there is Sirius, summer schools, and conferences. Someone stop me :) I started out teaching functional programming and algorithms; in recent years, I have been teaching immunology—which is very much in keeping with the rest of my career.

My spare time is divided between screens and mountains. On the screen, there are pet projects—the latest, Patinae, has been keeping me busier than usual—as well as Haskell, Lean, and dependent types in general, which account for about half the posts on this blog. In the mountains, it is skiing, rock climbing, and trekking: the only state I know in which my mind switches off from work completely.

That is, in fact, what I write about here—irregularly, and only when I have something to say. You can find my contact links above; write to me if you feel like arguing or would like to invite me to speak.