JOIN US! CSB Special Seminar & Open Discussion, David Garfield, PhD, Monday, November 16, 2026, 11:00 am – 12:45 pm, Munzer!
The Department of Chemical and Systems Biology Presents a Special Seminar & Open Discussion
David Garfield, PhD
AI for Life Sciences, Partnerships, Anthropic
Monday, November 16, 2026
11:00 AM – 12:45 PM
Munzer Auditorium
Discussion Moderators: Joanna Wysocka & Jordan Valgardson
Talk Title: “Science with Claude: agentic biology, data analysis, and human interactions in a world of LLMs”
An open discussion with the speaker will immediately follow the seminar presentation. Attendees are encouraged to bring their questions, perspectives, and ideas for an engaging conversation.
Abstract: Large language models are now good enough at reading, coding and reasoning to take on real pieces of a research project, and that changes what a day at the bench or the keyboard looks like. In this talk I’ll show how scientists are using Claude and Claude Science as agentic collaborators. The worked examples come from my own field of regulatory genomics: interpreting non-coding genetic variants with sequence-to-function models, and designing enhancers and promoters with defined activity. I’ll cover what works, where agents still mislead, and which habits keep the science rigorous. I’ll close with how Anthropic is working with academic labs. An open discussion follows, so please bring questions, skeptical ones included.
Speaker Bio: David Garfield works on AI for Life Sciences partnerships at Anthropic, where he builds research collaborations with universities and research institutes. He trained as an evolutionary developmental biologist and quantitative geneticist, did his postdoc with Eileen Furlong at EMBL, and then led an ERC-funded research group at Humboldt University in Berlin. He moved to industry at Bayer and then Genentech, where he was a Principal Scientist in computational biology working on human genetics, regulatory genomics and machine-learning models of sequence function. He joined Anthropic in 2026.