Bio

Jerry Yu is a Masters Student in the Statistics Department Co-Advised by Dr. Jungeum Kim. He graduated from NC State with dual degrees in Statistics and Horticultural Science (Plant Breeding and Biotechnology concentration). He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa. In his spare time he enjoys gardening and visiting rare plants. Jerry’s research focuses on understanding the internal logic of biological foundation models. He employs mechanistic interpretability techniques like Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) and linear probing to map the latent representations within models like AlphaFold and NTV3 that drive sequence prediction. His goal is to leverage these mechanistic insights into biological priors that can accelerate hypothesis generation and synthetic biology.