LabDAO

LabDAO was a decentralized autonomous organization built to make scientific tools and data accessible to every researcher in the world. It brought together wet lab science and computational science, open-source tooling and DAO governance, and disciplines from marine science to organizational psychology.

As Head of Data Science, I led the team behind a historical first for DeSci: real, published drug-discovery work run through decentralized science infrastructure — LabDAO’s first community preprint. Not just governance mechanics, and not a molecule we invented, but real computational science on a real molecule, done in the open by a distributed community. That proved decentralized organizations could produce scientific output, not just coordinate around it.

What our infrastructure contributed to that preprint was the docking — running DiffDock, then a brand-new AI docking model out of MIT, on our shared compute for a real molecule-design project. My own part was the ML-ops: as Head of Data Science I led the group that made a research model like DiffDock reliably runnable for a community lab in the first place — the containers, the shared cluster, the validation. It’s the same tools-and-methods work I’d done as a DeepChem co-architect, and I wrote about it — and gave the colleagues who drove the hands-on docking their due — in The Exploding Lego Set.

The team — the A-team of data scientists who are passionate about science — drove collaboration across marine science, rare illness medicine, and organizational psychology through the sister DAO, TalentDAO. The marine science work within LabDAO connects directly to the later ocean AI projects that evolved into the World Genome Academy.

The DeSci mullet: biotech in the front, hackathon in the back. LabDAO was part of the founding wave alongside VitaDAO and MoleculeDAO — a generation that raised roughly fifty million dollars for open science by building communities, not writing grants.