Dr Jenny Yang

Dr Jenny Yang is a Chinese-Canadian scientist and entrepreneur who completed her doctoral studies at the University of Oxford, where she researched clinical machine learning and earned her DPhil. She subsequently held a prestigious Marie Curie Fellowship, a European research award that supports exceptional early-career scientists, during which she deepened her expertise in algorithmic fairness, bias mitigation, and machine learning applied to clinical data. She also holds an undergraduate degree from the University of British Columbia.

Yang's research background spans the intersection of machine learning and biology, with a particular focus on generating interpretable, causal insights from complex biological datasets. This expertise gave her a rare vantage point on one of the most underexplored areas in biomedical science: the human microbiome. While most frontier biological AI models focus on human DNA, Yang identified the microbial communities living in and on the human body as a largely unmodelled layer that shapes drug metabolism, nutrient absorption, and individual health responses in ways that vary dramatically between people.

In 2025, Yang co-founded Outpost Bio in London with Alex Merwin, with Yang serving as CEO. The company's Lab-in-the-Loop platform combines high-throughput automated wet-lab experiments with machine learning, generating causal data about how specific microbial communities interact with chemical compounds. This enables pharmaceutical, food, and consumer health companies to predict how their products will perform across diverse microbiome compositions before entering costly trials.

Outpost Bio raised £2.6 million in a pre-seed round in March 2026, co-led by Merantix Capital and Seedcamp, with participation from OpenSeed VC and Defined. Seedcamp Partner Tom Wilson described Yang as part of a rare team combining deep microbiology, machine learning, and company-building experience.