Sophia Tang

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Email: sophtang [at] seas.upenn.edu

Hi! I am a second-year undergraduate student at the University of Pennsylvania pursuing a dual degree in computer science and business in the Jerome Fisher Program in Management & Technology.

I conduct research at the Chatterjee Lab, developing theoretical ML frameworks for biological discovery, and at the Mitchell Lab, designing lipid nanoparticle (LNP)-based delivery vehicles to transport mRNA across the blood-brain barrier. Working across two labs has enabled me to gain experience in both the computational and wet-lab side of bioengineering research, which you can explore on my publications page.

One of my favourite aspects of research is deeply understanding the theory behind the mechanisms governing the algorithms or biological processes that I study. To share this interest, I began writing in-depth technical guides on my substack, Alchemy Bio. My most read article, “A Complete Guide to Spherical Equivariant Graph Transformers” is a 2.5-hour long read breaking down the mathematics and physics underlying the structural deep learning architectures for molecules and proteins.

If you’re also passionate about any of these topics, I would love to connect via LinkedIn.

Updates

Jun 11, 2025 Branched Schrödinger Bridge Matching released on arXiv and accepted at ICML ExAIT workshop! Come by our poster in Vancouver!
May 01, 2025 PepTune: De Novo Generation of Therapeutic Peptides with Multi-Objective-Guided Discrete Diffusion accepted at ICML 2025! Come by us at Poster Session 4 to chat (+ free PepTune stickers)
Mar 31, 2025 My review paper on Peptide-Functionalized Nanoparticles for Brain-Targeted Therapeutics is published in Drug Delivery and Translational Research.
Mar 21, 2025 Gumbel-Softmax Flow Matching is out on arXiv! Check out our work on guided discrete flow matching on the simplex!

Selected Publications

For a full list, see my publications page or google scholar profile.

  1. branchsbm.png
    Branched Schrödinger Bridge Matching
    Sophia Tang , Yinuo Zhang , Alexander Tong and Pranam Chatterjee
    arXiv, Preprint, Jun 2025
  2. guidance.png
    Gumbel-Softmax Flow Matching with Straight-Through Guidance for Controllable Biological Sequence Generation
    Sophia Tang , Yinuo Zhang , Alexander Tong and Pranam Chatterjee
    arXiv, Preprint, Jun 2025
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    PepTune: De Novo Generation of Therapeutic Peptides with Multi-Objective-Guided Discrete Diffusion
    Sophia Tang , Yinuo Zhang and Pranam Chatterjee
    42nd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2025), Dec 2024
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    Peptide-Functionalized Lipid Nanoparticles for Targeted Systemic mRNA Delivery to the Brain
    Emily L. Han , Sophia Tang , Dongyoon Kim , Amanda M. Murray , Kelsey L. Swingle , Alex G. Hamilton , Kaitlin Mrksich , Marshall S. Padilla , Rohan Palanki , Jacqueline J. Li and Michael J. Mitchell
    Nano Letters, American Chemical Society (ACS), Dec 2024