Alex Rives is head of science at Biohub, leading its work at the intersection of artificial intelligence and biology. Alex was a founder and chief scientist at EvolutionaryScale, a public-benefit company developing AI to accelerate scientific discovery in biology, and delivering transformative AI systems and applications to benefit the global scientific community. He is a Core Institute Member at the Broad Institute and Assistant Professor in EECS at MIT. Alex was honored as part of the 2026 TIME100 AI list, recognizing him among the world’s most influential people shaping artificial intelligence.
As a scientist, Rives has done pioneering work in artificial intelligence for biology. He started and led the Evolutionary Scale Modeling, or ESM, project at Meta’s fundamental AI research lab, which developed the first large-scale transformer language models for proteins. The ESM models are widely recognized as a breakthrough in artificial intelligence for biology, and opened the field of language modeling in biology. These models are used by scientists worldwide, enabling applications including designing therapeutic proteins such as antibodies, predicting the effects of mutations in the human genome, illuminating evolutionary history, discovering new proteins, and creating models of the cell. Rives earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and biology from Yale University and a doctorate in computer science from New York University.