Derya Unutmaz, MD

Editorial bio

Derya Unutmaz is a professor of immunology at The Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine in Farmington, Connecticut, with a joint appointment at the University of Connecticut. He trained in medicine at Marmara University in Istanbul and did postdocs at Novartis and NYU before faculty roles at Vanderbilt and NYU, joining Jackson Lab around 2015. His lab works on human T-cell biology, immune aging, cancer immunotherapy and the immunology of ME/CFS and Long COVID; the body of work has racked up more than thirty thousand citations.

He's one of the earliest and loudest working-scientist voices putting AI directly into the lab. He uses OpenAI models and Codex-style tools for hypothesis generation, data analysis and digital twins, and talks openly about how fast biomedical discovery accelerates when a researcher stops treating the model as a toy and starts treating it as a collaborator. OpenAI has publicly recognised his scientific use of AI.

Worth following if you want to see what AI-assisted science actually looks like – not slideware about 'AI for biology', but a working immunologist running real experiments, mixed with sharp public commentary on longevity, robotics and the path to reversing aging.

By thehype editorial