Résumé. Updated January 2026.

David Soergel, Ph.D.

(650) 303-5324
 • lorax@lorax.org
 • https://davidsoergel.com/cv

Computing Skills

Summary

Software engineer, research scientist, and technical leader dedicated to building tools that catalyze progress in machine learning, the natural sciences, and climate solutions.

My expertise spans ML infrastructure, computational biology, database design, distributed computing, and user interface design. I specialize in designing systems that enable researchers to solve hard problems with confidence — prioritizing intuitive APIs, visualizations, and reproducible workflows, so users can focus on innovation rather than framework friction.

Education and Experience

2015 -
Software Engineer, Google AI.
  • Founder, manager, and tech lead of the AI Lineage group. Our systems track training data provenance, legal approvals, and data processing, and provide essential compliance reports, for Gemini and other GenAI models at Google.

2013 - 2015
Software Engineer, Google Maps.
  • Google My Maps and Google Maps Gallery.
2012 - 2013
Founding project lead, OpenReview.net.
  • Scoped, designed, and built system for open peer review of academic papers, housed in the lab of Andrew McCallum at UMass Amherst.
  • OpenReview.net has now been used for dozens of high-profile computer science conferences over many years.
2011 - 2013
Research Scientist and Software Engineer, School of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts Amherst.
  • Laboratory of Andrew McCallum.
  • Large-scale machine learning for natural language processing.
2011
University of Colorado, Boulder and University of California, Berkeley
  • Joint postdoctoral position with Rob Knight and Steven Brenner.
  • Topic: New Tools for Understanding the Composition and Dynamics of Microbial Communities in Human Body Habitats.
2003 - 2010
Ph.D. in Biophysics, University of California, Berkeley
2001 - 2003
Lead Bioinformatics Developer, The Molecular Sciences Institute, Berkeley, CA.
  • Databases and web applications supporting basic research in biology.
1998 - 2001
Silicon Valley startups (cofounder, etc.).

1999 - 2000

Research Associate, Department of Genetics, Stanford University School of Medicine.

  • Laboratory of L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza.
  • Databases and software for analyzing the geographic distributions of human genes.
1995 - 1998
B.S., Stanford University.
1992 - 1996
Student researcher in physics and computing.
  • San Onofre/Palo Verde Neutrino-Oscillation Experiment, Caltech.
  • H1 collaboration, Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY).
  • Institute for Scientific Computing Research, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
1993 - 1995
California Institute of Technology.

Publications

Gemini Team, ... Soergel D, ... (2025). Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilities. arXiv preprint. PDF

Power KC, Lee NS, Rendon-Torres K, Soergel DAW, Beery AK. (2025). A social switch: daylength drives meadow vole group dynamics in automatically tracked habitats. Animal Behaviour. Full Text

Gemini Team, ... Soergel D, ... (2024). Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of context. arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.05530. PDF

Gemini Team, ... Soergel D, ... (2023). Gemini: A Family of Highly Capable Multimodal Models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2312.11805. PDF

Smilkov D, Thorat N, Assogba Y, Yuan A, Kreeger N, Yu P, Zhang K, Cai S, Nielsen E, Soergel D, Bileschi S, Terry M, Nicholson C, Gupta SN, Sirajuddin S, Sculley D, Monga R, Corrado G, Viegas FB, Wattenberg M. (2019). TensorFlow.js: Machine Learning for the Web and Beyond. Proceedings of the 2nd SysML Conference, Palo Alto, CA, USA. PDF

Xia D, Mewald D, Sculley D, Soergel DAW, Roumpos G, Cheng H, Polosukhin I, Smith JA, Xie J, Hong L, Wicke M, Ispir M, Tucker PD, Tang Y, Haque Z. (2017). TensorFlow Estimators: Managing Simplicity vs. Flexibility in High-Level Machine Learning Frameworks. Proceedings of the 23th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, Halifax, Canada. PDF

Soergel DAW. (2015). Rampant software errors may undermine scientific results. F1000Research 3: 303. Full Text, PDF, Reviews and Discussion

Soergel DAW, Saunders AC, McCallum A. (2013). Open Scholarship and Peer Review: a Time for Experimentation. ICML Workshop on Peer Reviewing and Publishing Models (PEER). PDF, Discussion

Dey N, Soergel DAW, Repo S, Brenner SE. (2013). Association of gut microbiota with post-operative clinical course in Crohn's disease. BMC Gastroenterology 13: 131. Full text, PDF

Soergel DAW, Dey N, Knight R, Brenner SE. (2012). Selection of primers for optimal taxonomic classification of environmental 16S rRNA gene sequences. The ISME Journal 6: 1440-1444. Full text, PDF

Yooseph S, Sutton G, Rusch DB, ... Soergel DAW, ... Venter, JC. (2007). The Sorcerer II global ocean sampling expedition: expanding the universe of protein families. PLoS Biology 5: e16. Full text

Lareau LF, Brooks AN, Soergel DAW, Meng Q, Brenner SE. (2007). The coupling of alternative splicing and nonsense-mediated mRNA decay. In Blencowe B and Graveley B, ed., Alternative splicing in the post-genomic era (pp. 190-211), Landes Bioscience. PDF

Soergel DAW, Lareau LF, Brenner SE. (2006). Regulation of gene expression by the coupling of alternative splicing and nonsense-mediated mRNA decay. In Maquat L, ed., Nonsense-mediated mRNA decay (pp. 175-196), Landes Bioscience. PDF

Soergel DAW, Choi K, Thomson T, Doane J, George B, Morgan-Linial R, Brent R, Endy D. (2004). MONOD, a collaborative tool for manipulating biological knowledge. Working paper

Grants and Awards

Chang-Lin Tien Scholar in Environmental Sciences and Biodiversity, UC Berkeley. (2008-2010)

Contributing author to a successful NIH R01 grant to Rob Knight. (2011)

Predoctoral Fellow, Howard Hughes Medical Institute. (2003-2008)

National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship. (2003, declined)

Caltech and Stanford Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowships. (1994, 1995, 1997)

Caltech Merit Awards. (1994, 1995)

Robert Andrews Millikan Scholar, Caltech. (1993)

Teaching and Mentoring

Research Mentor for graduate rotation students, undergraduate research assistants, and software developers. (5 total, 2005-2010)

Graduate Student Instructor for Microbial Genetics and Genomics, U.C. Berkeley (2007)