Hi! I’m a PhD student at Berkeley and NSF GRFP fellow, working at the intersection of ML and scientific design (proteins, materials). I’m advised by Jennifer Listgarten and Sergey Levine. These days, I’m most interested in understanding how domain-specific aspects of the scientific design problems I work on interact with various models and design algorithms.

During my undergrad (Caltech), I primarily spent time thinking about adaptive experiment design, Bayesian inference, and GPs and uncertainty quantification in Yisong Yue’s group. I also had a lot of fun teaching for a variety of the core CS / ML courses!

Selected Publications

Leveraging Discrete Function Decomposability for Scientific Design
JC Bowden, S Levine, J Listgarten
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2026

Active learning-assisted directed evolution
J Yang, RG Lal, JC Bowden, R Astudillo, MA Hameedi, S Kaur, M Hill, Y Yue, FH Arnold
Nature Communications 2025