Jordan M. Sorokin
About
Neuroscientist and data scientist
Jordan Sorokin is a neuroscientist and data scientist with nearly two decades of research spanning the wet lab and the computer. He currently works as a researcher at Amae Health, applying machine learning and data science to hard problems in human health.
How he got here
His path into science started at the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied how economic upheaval shapes mood and life satisfaction at the Center for Positive Psychology, and later measured the effects of chemotherapy on whole-brain metabolism using PET/CT imaging — work that became his first peer-reviewed publication. A summer at the Salk Institute pulled him toward neurons and circuits, and he never really left.
He earned his PhD in Neuroscience at Stanford in the Huguenard Lab, studying absence epilepsy — a form of seizure that arises from the delicate dialogue between the thalamus and the cortex. Combining electrophysiology, optogenetics, and applied mathematics, his dissertation uncovered pre-seizure neural signatures that predict when a seizure will begin, and showed how the same circuit can both initiate and abort seizures in real time. That research appeared in Neuron, Science, and the Journal of Neuroscience, and was supported by an NIH F31 predoctoral grant.
From studying biology to engineering it
After graduate school, Jordan moved from studying biology to engineering it. At Herophilus he built machine-learning models across biological domains and co-led disease programs, turning messy high-content imaging data into decisions. At Recursion he worked as a staff data scientist in computational biology, developing state-of-the-art representation-learning models for transcriptomics and helping steer scientific strategy inside one of the largest industrialized drug-discovery platforms in the world.
Across all of it, a few things stay constant: a conviction that new technology should accelerate real science rather than decorate it, a preference for software that is scalable and durable, and a genuine enjoyment of working across disciplines — sitting between biologists, engineers, and mathematicians and helping them understand one another.
Outside the lab
Jordan serves on the Arts and Culture Board for the City of Fort Collins, makes music (some of it lives on SoundCloud), and mentors scientists finding their footing at the boundary of biology and computation. He speaks English and Spanish.