Hello! My name is Hao Cai.

I am a data scientist at Achievers in Toronto. I work on AI applications in our employee recognition & rewards platform, building different data products that helps improve employee engagement levels in big organizations.

My background is biophysics. I completed PhD at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, where I studied a protein family called DgHBP, which forms a remarkable material in nature – the beak of jumbo squid. I was fascinated by how sophisticated protein behaviors are controlled by their source code – amino acid sequence, and therefore moved from bench work to coding.

After PhD I moved to Toronto and worked as a computational biologist in Toronto. Working at the intersection of data science and biology, I applied many machine learning methods in the research of an important biological process (“biomolecular condensation”) that underlies many cellular functions and neurological diseases, and build different predictive algorithms to help prevent neurological diseases such as Azheimers’ disease and Parkinsons’disease.

In 2020, I decided to move from academic research to a career in data science. I joined Insight Data Science and worked on a project predicting startup’s success using twitter data (link). It was a lot of fun! Shortly after that I joined an insuratech startup (Lydia.ai) in Toronto and worked on insurance claim automation and AI-assisted underwriting and risk prediction. These experiences really shaped my view on how AI is applied in the industry and made me want to keep learning and growing in this field. Therefore I created this website.

Aside from coding, I’m also interested in entrepreneurship. As a former student entrepreneur, I kept a close eye on many industries (e-commmerce, healthcare, education, …) and new startups, and also used my data science skills to analyze them, which you can find some in my blogs.