Dr. Day-Williams has worked at the intersection of computation, genetics, and biology for over 25 years.

His distinguished career spans premier research institutions, major pharmaceutical companies, and innovative biotech startups exploiting high-throughput biology to reveal disease insights. He currently works as an independent consultant leveraging his deep technical knowledge and extensive experience in biotech and pharma R&D providing strategic leadership to venture capital firms,and public and private biotech companies on investment assessments, target ID, algorithm development, and target/program evaluation and prioritization.

As a Florida Academic Scholar at the University of Florida, Aaron’s undergraduate computational research on bacterial genome evolution of a transcriptional control system earned him a research internship at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). As part of the DOE’s bioterrorism program, Aaron’s internship made critical contributions by computationally predicting the genes in the virulenceplasmids for Yersinia pestis and Bacillus anthracis. Upon graduating from UF, Aaron returned to LANL as a bioinformatics engineer, where he developed crucial management and analysis software for cDNA microarray technology deployed at LANL and Washington University. His PhD research in the Department of Human Genetics at UCLA, supported by an NSF Integrated Graduate Education & Research fellowship, culminated in winning the International Genetic Epidemiology Society’s Best Paperof the Year for a set of innovative statistical algorithms for gene mapping published from his dissertation. As a Wellcome Trust Postdoctoral Fellow at the Sanger Institute, Aaron was a leading analyst for groundbreaking genetic studies including the pilot phase of the 1000 Genomes Project, the UK10K project, and T2DGENES.

Transitioning to the biopharmaceutical industry, Aaron has been a leader in utilizing human genetics and computational biology for drug discovery and development. As the head of statistical genetics at Biogen, he spearheaded the genetic rationale for the ATXN2 ALS program including designing inclusion/exclusion criteria for an arm of the Ph1/2 clinical trial and leading the company’s participation in the Open Targets Consortium with GSK, EMBL-EBI, and the Sanger Institute. Leading the Quantitative Target Sciences group at Merck, his group developed a novel machine-learning algorithm for causal genetic variant prioritization and securing the company’s participation in the FinnGen Consortium, a public-private partnership between seven pharmaceutical companies and the Finnish Government allowing access to longitudinal medical records of 500K Finnish citizens. At Flagship Pioneering, Aaron architected the scientific thesis and computational platform that launched Serqet Therapeutics (formerly FL60, currently Vesalius Therapeutics). As VP of Data Science and Computational Biology, the innovative computation/wet lab feedback-loop-driven platform led to the rapid discovery and validation of two neurodegenerative targets, with GSK licensing its first molecule in 2024. Advancing the immuno-oncology cell therapy programs at Matterhorn Biosciences as VP of Data Science and Computational Biology, Aaron’s team developed an ML-driven mass-spec metabolomics platform for TCR ligand identification.