Bio
David Cox is an Assistant Professor of Genetics and by courtesy of Medicine (Hematology) at Stanford University and Principal Investigator of the Cox Lab (coxlab.bio), which is opening in July 2025. He is also a ChEM-H Institute Scholar and Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator.
He completed his undergraduate studies in biology at Stanford University, where he worked with Irving Weissman on understanding how the innate immune system recognizes cancer cells. He then entered the Harvard-MIT MD-PhD program, earning his MD from the Harvard-MIT program in Health Sciences and Technology (HST) and his PhD in biology from MIT. His doctoral dissertation with Feng Zhang focused on the discovery and development of CRISPR-Cas enzymes as novel DNA and RNA editing tools. During his final year of medical school, he worked as a visiting scientist with David Baker, where he initiated efforts to design sequence-specific DNA binding proteins de novo.
Following medical school, Cox completed internal medicine residency and a clinical fellowship in hematology at Stanford, where he concurrently conducted postdoctoral research in Rhiju Das's lab. In the Das lab, he fine-tuned large language models for RNA structure prediction and developed new methods for highly multiplexed detection of RNA-protein interactions.
His current list of publications and patents is available here: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ZohHoFYAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao
