Zach Debruine
Founder at Van Andel Institute
Grand Rapids, Michigan, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolZach Debruine is a founder-CEO, researcher, and educator with a decade of experience building ML-driven tools for genomics and rare disease communities. As founder of Herd Social he’s combining domain expertise and product design to create a social platform tailored to families and patients affected by rare conditions. He leads student research at Grand Valley State University, developing multimodal generative AI models for large-scale single-cell and genomics data while teaching practical, interdisciplinary AI literacy. Zach’s academic work includes a PhD and postdoctoral development of the fastest Non-negative Matrix Factorization implementation and high-performance bioinformatics code (Rcpp/C++) used in single-cell modeling. A rare-disease parent himself, he brings personal urgency to translational research and community-building, pairing wet-lab roots with production ML engineering (PyTorch). Based in Grand Rapids, MI, he mentors early-career researchers and bridges entrepreneurship, open-source tooling, and biomedical impact.
10 years of coding experience
Bachelor of Science Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Bachelor of Science Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Hope CollegeGraduate Student Bioinformatics and Biochemistry, Graduate Student Bioinformatics and Biochemistry at Van Andel Institute Graduate School
English, Dutch
Stackoverflow
3,627reputation
925kreached
36answers
64questions
Github Skills (59)
single-cell-genomics10
nmf10
r10
sparse-matrix10
matrix-factorization10
single-cell-analysis10
rcpp10
clustering10
rcppeigen10
cran10
r-package9
machine-learning9
variational-autoencoder9
deconvolution7
spatial-transcriptomics7
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
zdebruine/singlet-website
May 2026 - Jul 2026
Contributions:1859 pushes in 2 months
zdebruine/zachdebruine.com
Oct 2021 - May 2026
Contributions:28 pushes in 4 years 8 months
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