PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Kyunghyun Cho

Kyunghyun Cho studies neural machine translation and machine learning for protein design. He earned degrees at KAIST and Aalto, held research posts at Mila and Facebook AI Research, and co-founded Prescient Design in 2021. His work includes attention models for translation and discrete methods for antibody design; he received the 2021 Samsung Ho-Am Prize in Engineering, and ICLR gave his 2024 protein discovery paper an Outstanding Paper Award. As of October 2026, he is Ortet’s CEO and co-founder and the Glen de Vries Professor of Health Statistics at NYU.

Now at
New York University and Ortet
Works
475
Citations
94,381
h-index
67

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 14 October 2026.

Photo of Kyunghyun Cho

Timeline

  1. 2009–2020

    Degrees and early research posts

    He earns a B.S. in computer science at KAIST in 2009, an M.S. in machine learning and data mining at Aalto in 2011, and a Ph.D. at Aalto in 2014. He completes a postdoctoral fellowship at Mila and Université de Montréal in 2015, then works as a research scientist at Facebook AI Research from 2017 to 2020.

  2. 2014–2025

    Neural translation papers

    In 2014, he co-authors the RNN Encoder-Decoder paper for statistical machine translation. In 2025, ICLR names his 2015 attention paper, Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate, a Test of Time runner-up.

  3. 2021

    Co-founding Prescient Design

    He co-founds Prescient Design at the beginning of 2021 and receives the Samsung Ho-Am Prize in Engineering in 2021.

  4. February 2022

    Protein design at NYU

    In February 2022, he speaks at an NYU CILVR seminar about Prescient Design’s machine-learning platform for protein design. The platform’s strategy uses a deep manifold sampler combined with a function predictor.

  5. March 2022

    TMLR Editor-in-Chief

    In March 2022, he serves as an Editor-in-Chief when Transactions on Machine Learning Research opens submissions.

  6. 2024

    Antibody protein discovery

    He co-authors Protein Discovery with Discrete Walk-Jump Sampling, a method for sequence-based antibody design. ICLR gives the paper an Outstanding Paper Award in 2024.

  7. 2025

    Professor of Health Statistics

    NYU names him the Glen de Vries Professor of Health Statistics in 2025.

  8. As of October 2026

    Co-founding Ortet

    He leaves Prescient Design/Genentech/Roche and returns to NYU full time in January 2026. In September 2026, he launches Ortet as co-founder and CEO; as of October 2026, he is Ortet’s CEO and the Glen de Vries Professor of Health Statistics at NYU.

Sources and credits

Photo: Xuthoria, via Wikimedia Commons. License: CC BY-SA 4.0. Source: commons.wikimedia.org. Cropped to a square and resized. Ask us to remove or replace this photo.

  1. Kyunghyun Cho | NYU Courant cims.nyu.edu. Checked 14 October 2026.
  2. Mila alumnus gives $35,000 to promote equity and diversity at Mila and within the AI community | Mila mila.quebec. Checked 14 October 2026.
  3. Hyundai Motor and Kia Recruit AI Expert to Strengthen Smart Technology Development and Mobility Business Opportunities hyundai.com. Checked 14 October 2026.
  4. Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation arxiv.org. Checked 14 October 2026.
  5. Announcing the Test of Time Award Winners from ICLR 2015 – ICLR Blog blog.iclr.cc. Checked 14 October 2026.
  6. Follow-up donation after 2 years – Kyunghyun Cho kyunghyuncho.me. Checked 14 October 2026.
  7. Previous Laureates - HOAM hoamfoundation.org. Checked 14 October 2026.
  8. CILVR Seminar Series | ai @ NYU cims.nyu.edu. Checked 14 October 2026.
  9. TMLR is now accepting submissions jmlr.org. Checked 14 October 2026.
  10. ICLR 2024 Outstanding Paper Awards – ICLR Blog blog.iclr.cc. Checked 14 October 2026.
  11. Protein Discovery with Discrete Walk-Jump Sampling proceedings.iclr.cc. Checked 14 October 2026.
  12. Kyunghyun Cho Named Glen de Vries Professor of Health Statistics cims.nyu.edu. Checked 14 October 2026.
  13. Leaving Prescient Design/Genentech/Roche – Kyunghyun Cho kyunghyuncho.me. Checked 14 October 2026.
  14. Ortet Launches as Frontier AI Lab for Health With $500 Million Commitment from Thoreau | FinancialContent financialcontent.com. Checked 14 October 2026.