PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Nathan Frey

Also known as Nathan C. Frey

Nathan Frey is a machine learning researcher who applies generative models to drug discovery and protein design. A materials scientist by training, he earned a PhD at the University of Pennsylvania as a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellow, did a postdoctoral fellowship at MIT, and published Neural scaling of deep chemical models in Nature Machine Intelligence in 2023. As a group leader at Genentech's Prescient Design, he and twelve coauthors won an ICLR 2024 Outstanding Paper award for Protein Discovery with Discrete Walk-Jump Sampling. He co-founded the biotech startup Coefficient Bio in 2025, and Anthropic acquired it in April 2026. He leads drug discovery and development research at Anthropic.

Now at
Anthropic
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Timeline

  1. By 2019

    Penn PhD and 2D materials

    He does a PhD in Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania as a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellow. In 2019, he leads a study in Vivek Shenoy's group, published in ACS Nano, that uses positive-and-unlabeled machine learning to predict 18 MXene compounds as candidates for synthesis.

  2. 2023

    Neural scaling of chemical models

    A postdoctoral fellow at MIT, he is first author of Neural scaling of deep chemical models, written at MIT Lincoln Laboratory with Rafael Gómez-Bombarelli, Connor Coley, Vijay Gadepally and others. Nature Machine Intelligence publishes it in 2023; it finds a scaling exponent of 0.17 for chemical language models on the largest dataset studied.

  3. By 2024

    Group leader at Prescient Design

    By 2024, he is a Principal Machine Learning Scientist and Group Leader at Prescient Design, Genentech. His work there covers lab-in-the-loop therapeutic antibody design, discrete diffusion, interpretability, and foundation models for drug discovery.

  4. 2024

    An ICLR Outstanding Paper award

    In 2024, he and twelve coauthors, including Kyunghyun Cho and Saeed Saremi, win an ICLR Outstanding Paper award for Protein Discovery with Discrete Walk-Jump Sampling. The method learns a smoothed energy function, samples it with Langevin MCMC, and returns to the data with one-step denoising; in laboratory tests of antibody designs, 97-100% of generated samples are expressed and purified.

  5. 2025

    Co-founding Coefficient Bio

    He co-founds Coefficient Bio in 2025, a New York biotech AI startup that works in stealth with a team smaller than ten people, and serves as its CTO.

  6. April 2026

    Anthropic acquires Coefficient Bio

    In April 2026, Anthropic acquires Coefficient Bio in an all-stock deal reported at about $400 million. The team of fewer than 10 people joins Anthropic's healthcare and life sciences division.

  7. As of October 2026

    Drug discovery research at Anthropic

    He leads drug discovery and development research at Anthropic. His team is building a "pipeline-in-a-person" so that one biotech operator and a number of Claudes can create and operate drug programs, with the aim of making Claude the best model for biotech.

Career

  1. Since 2026AnthropicDrug discovery and development research lead
  2. From 2025Coefficient BioCo-founder and CTO
  3. Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyPostdoctoral Fellow
  4. RochePrincipal Machine Learning Scientist and Group Leader

Education

  1. University of PennsylvaniaPhD in Materials Science and Engineering

From the biography.

  1. 22 of 133 people shaping AI with a former OpenAI role now work at AnthropicIncludes Anthropic. Our estimates of where OpenAI recruits came from and where 133 people with former OpenAI roles work now, including the companies and labs they founded.
  2. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labsIncludes Anthropic. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labs. We compare publishing careers, recent citations, dual appointments and job moves across 2,420 university researchers and 308 frontier-lab researchers.
  3. Companies supply the most prior-work hires at 7 of the 9 frontier AI labsIncludes Anthropic. Our estimates of the organizations where 550 people worked directly before joining 9 frontier AI labs across 620 career transitions, comparing the main feeder organizations per lab.
  4. Of 943 people shaping AI who worked at Google, 446 work there nowIncludes Anthropic. Our estimates of where the 943 people shaping AI who worked at Google and Google DeepMind work now: 446 at Google and 452 across 278 other organizations.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Nathan Frey yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Nathan C. Frey ncfrey.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  2. Penn Engineers: New Machine Learning Approach Predicts Which 2D Materials Can Be Synthesized | Penn Engineering engineering.upenn.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  3. Neural scaling of deep chemical models | Nature Machine Intelligence nature.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  4. Computer Vision News - June 2024 – Page 8 rsipvision.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  5. ICLR 2024 Awards iclr.cc. Checked 21 October 2026.
  6. Anthropic moves deeper into biotech with reported Coefficient Bio deal - TechInformed techinformed.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  7. Anthropic Pays $400M for an AI Biotech With Fewer Than Ten People | BiopharmaTrend biopharmatrend.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  8. Anthropic just paid $400 million for a startup with fewer than 10 people thenextweb.com. Checked 21 October 2026.