Principal Engineer at Google, AI and Infrastructure
Joined May 2009
- Tweets 412
- Following 516
- Followers 920
- Likes 6,080
63 Photos and videos
Joan Smith retweeted
Feb 13
You can write a self-replicating physical program in just 45 tokens (RNA bases). That's small enough to emerge spontaneously via brute force recombination at scale.
Feb 13
AI is cool and all... but a new paper in @ScienceMagazine kind of figured out the origin of life?
The paper reports the discovery of a simple 45-nucleotide RNA molecule that can perfectly copy itself.
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Joan Smith retweeted
3 Dec 2025
I’m excited to share a new postdoctoral opportunity in my lab at Stanford to study the consequences of gene dosage alterations in iPS cells. Check out the posting below and shoot me an email if you’re interested -
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Joan Smith retweeted
1 Dec 2025
New from my lab on bioRxiv - we found an existing drug that appears to be safe in humans that selectively kills chemotherapy-resistant cancer cells.
1 Dec 2025
A clinical-stage oncology compound selectively targets drug-resistant cancers biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/… #biorxiv_cancer
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Joan Smith retweeted
4 Aug 2025
Thrilled to share our new paper describing the development and characterization of CDK11 inhibitors for cancer therapy. We also establish a new system that I think represents a huge leap forward in our ability to understand drug toxicity in a living organism.
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4 Jun 2025
I'm thrilled to share that my family and I are moving to Palo Alto. I'll be continuing my work at Google building out our AI infrastructure for maximal efficiency and speed.
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4 Jun 2025
It's an incredible time for the field and our company, and I am so excited to continue this work in-person with my brilliant colleagues.
And, pulling everything together, my husband Jason will be joining the faculty at Stanford, moving his cancer research lab from Yale.
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4 Jun 2025
I'm eager to get to know our new community -- please reach out and say hi!
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Joan Smith retweeted
8 Jan 2024
An interesting trend I found:
Among the top 10 national winners at the Intel/Westinghouse Science Fair from 1990 to 2002, 66% of them are now in academia.
Among the same group from 2003 to 2014, less than a third are academics.
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Joan Smith retweeted
6 Jul 2023
Check out our new study in @ScienceMagazine, where we take on a 100-year-old debate: what’s the role of aneuploidy in cancer?
We discovered that genetically removing extra chromosomes blocks cancer growth - a phenomenon we call “aneuploidy addiction”. science.org/doi/10.1126/scie…
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Joan Smith retweeted
29 Sep 2022
Proud to announce the launch of Meliora Therapeutics, a mechanism-focused drug development company, co-founded with @davidycli and @joans, with $11M in seed funding from @HOFCapital, @obviousvc, @Zhenfund, @villageglobal, and others.
wsj.com/articles/biotech-mel…
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Joan Smith retweeted
23 Apr 2022
Welcome Tavi Glenn Sheltzer-Smith! Born on 4/21/22. 8 pounds 3 ounces, 21 inches long. Mother and baby are doing great!
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Joan Smith retweeted
18 Nov 2021
a popular myth is that people who are Very Computer have computers that work. nothing could be further from the truth. the Very Computer are capable of generating much more novel and fascinating ways to make computers not fucking work and exercise this capability wantonly
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Joan Smith retweeted
2 Jun 2021
New paper from @joans and me! A pan-cancer, cross-platform analysis identifies >100,000 genomic biomarkers for cancer outcomes. Plus, a website to explore the data (survival.cshl.edu) and a (controversial?) discussion of “cause” vs. “correlation” in cancer genome analysis.
2 Jun 2021
Genome-wide identification and analysis of prognostic features in human cancers biorxiv.org/cgi/content/shor… #bioRxiv
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Joan Smith retweeted
21 May 2021
I’m excited to share that I’ll be joining the Yale School of Medicine as an assistant professor! My lab will be moving from CSHL to Yale this summer. And we’re hiring! If you’re interested in working on cancer genomics, chromosome engineering, or drug targeting, drop me a line.
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22 Apr 2021
This is a great team of smart and kind people that does super cool, meaningful work.
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Joan Smith retweeted
16 Nov 2020
Can’t wait for @wirecutter to tell me which vaccine to take.
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Pfizer’s Covid-19 Vaccine Proves 90% Effective in Latest Trials
wsj.com/articles/covid-19-va…
SCIENCE WINS!!! This is GREAT news for mRNA technology, AWESOME for the stabilized prefusion spike antigen.
I am in tears.
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20 Sep 2020
Motivated by RBG's death, and the incredible need to win in November, I spent some time this afternoon calling voters for Biden. It was straightforward and on-demand. No sign up or training needed, and the script is built in: joebiden.com/natcalls/
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Joan Smith retweeted
21 Aug 2020
I’ve spent more time just walking outside in the past 5 months than I have in my entire life and one thing that I feel more certain about than ever is how important it is to have free public parks, playgrounds, and outdoor green spaces accessible to all people in all communities.
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