University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Aug 2021 – May 2025
BS Biology — minors in Chemistry and Medical Anthropology
GPA 3.9 · Highest Distinction · Dean's List · Carolina Research Scholar
Curriculum vitae August 2026
Ricardo Scheufen Tieghi
Program Analyst, Guidehouse — supporting the Office of the NIH Director
Durham, North Carolina · he/him
Education
Research & professional experience
National Institutes of Health — Office of the NIH Director
Jun 2025 – Present
Program Analyst
via Guidehouse · Bethesda, MD
- Authored a publication with the FDA Commissioner, the FDA CDER Director, and the NIH Deputy Director on alternatives to animal testing in preclinical research, in NEJM AI.
- Co-led development of the $5M AI and Biomedical Foundation Model Challenge.
- Led portfolio analysis for the Bio Genesis Mission, a $1.2B initiative from NIH's Chief AI Office.
- Co-authored and supported development of the NIH AI Strategic Plan (2026–2029).
- Built a multi-agent dashboard for the multimodal-AI award program using LLMs and MCP servers, cutting award-management time by roughly 50% in six months.
- Deployed a portfolio analysis agent now serving six NIH Institutes and Centers, used for 15+ analyses for NIH leadership.
- Delivered three portfolio analyses under compressed deadlines for congressional House Appropriations, analyzing 1,900+ grants with custom agentic AI pipelines.
Human Chemical Company
Dec 2025 – Jul 2026
AI Solutions Strategy Consultant
Chapel Hill, NC
- Developed tools to assess pharmacokinetic properties of chemicals for an agentic AI startup.
National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences
Jun 2024 – May 2025
Intern
Division of Translational Toxicology, NICEATM · Morrisville, NC
Supervisor: Dr. Nicole Kleinstreuer, Director of NICEATM
- Presented computational modeling work on skin sensitization, developmental toxicity, and acute and chronic toxicity at seven conferences; received 14 research awards and a best paper of the year award at the SOT Annual Meeting.
- Published 10 projects aimed at refining and replacing animal use in toxicity testing with machine learning.
- Collaborated with industry partners to model complex mixtures and review best practices for deep learning in medicinal chemistry.
UNC Molecular Modeling Lab
May 2023 – May 2025
Machine Learning Intern
Chapel Hill, NC
Supervisor: Dr. Alexander Tropsha
- Led AI and machine-learning implementation for five toxicology projects on developmental toxicity, skin sensitization, and liver toxicity.
- Contributed to over $1.8M in awarded funding for species-specific toxicity concordance analysis and mechanism-based modeling.
- Applied QSAR best practices across eight endpoints — data curation, performance benchmarking, context of use, model validation, and 2D similarity.
Publications
Published
- The Promise of Animal Testing Alternatives at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health. NEJM AI (2025) ai.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/Aipc2500587
- A Novel Machine Learning Model and a Web Portal for Predicting the Human Skin Sensitization Effects of Chemical Agents. Toxics (MDPI) (2024) doi.org/10.3390/toxics12110803 Editor's ChoiceSOT Paper of the YearNIEHS Paper of the Month
- DeTox: an In Silico Alternative to Animal Testing for Predicting Developmental Toxicity Potential. Environmental Health Perspectives (2026) doi.org/10.1021/EHP.6c01149
- External Validation of STopTox as an in Silico Alternative to Animal Toxicity Testing. Environmental Health Perspectives (2025) pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40393008/
- Automating Data Extraction from Scientific Literature and General PDF Files Using Large Language Models and KNIME: an Application in Toxicology. WIREs Computational Molecular Science (2025) doi.org/10.1002/wcms.70047
- The medicinal chemist's map to deep learning: Concepts, applications, and case studies. Elsevier Reference Module in Chemistry, Molecular Sciences and Chemical Engineering (2025) Co-first author. doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-443-29808-0.00066-2
- Synergistic Toxicity in Alcohol-Associated Liver Disease and PFAS Exposure. Toxicological Sciences (2025) doi.org/10.1093/toxsci/kfaf110
- Democratizing Artificial Intelligence in Toxicology: Real-World Applications and Automated Computational Workflows. ACS Chemical Research in Toxicology (2025) doi.org/10.1021/acs.chemrestox.6c00093
Preprint
- Breaking the Phalanx: Overcoming Bacterial Drug Resistance with Quorum Sensing Inhibitors that Enhance Therapeutic Activity of Antibiotics. bioRxiv (2025) doi.org/10.1101/2025.01.17.633658
Under review
- Importance and Challenges of Computational Modeling of Pesticides and Chemical Mixtures in Environmental Health: A Review. ACS Chemical Reviews Co-first author.
In preparation
- AI Agents as Collaborators in Drug Discovery and Development. Nature
- CAMERA: A Centralized Public Resource for Validated Alternative Methods to Support Regulatory Decision-Making.
- Elucidation of Adverse Outcome Pathways for Compound-induced Developmental Neurotoxicity using Knowledge Graphs.
Invited talks
- March 2027 Upcoming Continuing Education Course — Speaker & Co-Chair — SOT 66th Annual Meeting, San Antonio, Texas.
- November 2026 Upcoming Continuing Education Course — Speaker & Co-Chair — ACT Annual Meeting, San Antonio, Texas.
- December 2025 Brown Paper Bag Seminar — Dynanet Corporation, Virtual.
- November 2025 AI, Animals, and the Law — George Washington University Law School, Washington, D.C.. Watch recording
- October 2025 Comprehensive Toxicity Assessment with Agentic AI — CE Course Speaker & Co-Chair — ASCCT 13th Annual Meeting, Durham, North Carolina.
- August 2025 Early Career Best Oral Presentation Two presentations on in silico alternatives to animal testing — 13th World Congress on Alternatives and Animal Use in the Life Sciences, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
- June 2025 BDRP Innovator Award Finalist Innovator Award Finalist presentation — Society for Birth Defects Research & Prevention Annual Meeting, Denver, Colorado.
- May 2025 Division of Translational Toxicology Science Forum — NIEHS, Virtual.
- April 2025 Annual Symposium presentation — NIEHS Scholars Connect Program, Durham, North Carolina.
- March 2025 Symposium Speaker & Co-Chair — SOT 64th Annual Meeting, Orlando, Florida.
- February 2025 ASCCT–ESTIV Award Winners Webinar — ASCCT & ESTIV, Virtual. Watch recording
- November 2024 1st Prize Three Minute Thesis Competition — NIEHS Fall Connection — NIEHS, Durham, North Carolina.
- October 2024 Suzanne Fitzpatrick Award Flash Talk — ASCCT 13th Annual Meeting, Durham, North Carolina.
Conference posters
- March 2025 SOT Undergraduate Research Award A Novel Machine Learning Model and a Web Portal for Predicting the Human Skin Sensitization Effects of Chemical Agents — SOT 64th Annual Meeting, Orlando, Florida.
- October 2024 ASCCT Travel Award HuSSPred: an in-silico HPPT-based tool for Human Skin Sensitization Prediction & the DeTox Project — ASCCT 13th Annual Meeting, Durham, North Carolina.
- September 2024 1st Prize HuSSPred: an in-silico HPPT-based tool for Human Skin Sensitization Prediction — NCSOT Annual Meeting, Durham, North Carolina.
- May 2024 SURF Award Endothelial Nuclear Proteins SUN1 & SUN2 regulate Microtubule Organization in Endothelial Cells — UNC Celebration of Undergraduate Research, Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
- March 2024 BMSS Abstract Award Finalist PregPred: A Novel Web-Accessible Computational Tool for Predicting Developmental Toxicity — SOT 63rd Annual Meeting, Salt Lake City, Utah.
Awards
Research awards
- Prize Winner NIH Replication Prize ~$55,000 · 2026 Recognized in both Track 1 (Replication Ideas) and Track 2 (Replication Exemplars).
- Prize Winner NIH Complement-ARIE Challenge ~$50,000
- Winner Best Paper of the Year — SOT In Vitro and Alternatives Section · 2025
- Winner ×2 Best Intramural Paper of the Month, NIEHS
- Winner Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) ~$4,000 · 2023
Presentation & institutional
- Recipient UNC Chancellor's Walter S. Spearman Award · 2025 Awarded to the senior whose academic achievement, leadership, and strength of character are judged most outstanding.
- Winner SOT Undergraduate Research Award ~$1,500 · 2025
- Winner Best Oral Presentation, Early Career — 13th World Congress ~$500 · 2025 Sponsored by AIVT.
- Winner Travel Award — 13th World Congress ~$1,000 · 2025
- 2nd Prize BDRP Innovator Award ~$300 · 2025
- 1st Prize RDTSS Poster Competition ~$400 Sponsored by Pfizer and Elsevier.
- Winner Society for Birth Defects Research Travel Award ~$500 · 2025
- Winner SOT Diversity Initiatives Career Development Award ~$1,000
- 1st Prize NCSOT Undergraduate Student Poster Competition ~$300 · 2024
- Winner ASCCT Suzanne Fitzpatrick Student Travel Award ~$1,000 · 2024
- 1st Prize NIEHS Scholars Connect Elevator Pitch Competition · 2024
- Winner UNC Office of Undergraduate Research Travel Award ~$300
- Finalist SOT 63rd Annual Meeting Biological Modeling Specialty Section Abstract Award · 2024
Leadership & service
ACS Chemical Research in Toxicology and JCIM
Aug 2022 – 2024
Peer Reviewer
Reviewed 10+ publications on computational toxicology and machine learning.
Skills
Domains
- Computational Toxicology
- Machine Learning
- Large Language Models
- Agentic AI
- Data Modeling
Tools
- Python
- PyTorch
- RDKit
- Scikit-Learn
- Optuna
- Plotly
- Matplotlib
- HTML
- CSS
- Microsoft Azure
News coverage
- March 2026 Announcing the Winners of the NIH Replication Prize — NIH Common Fund.
- September 2025 Grouping Chemicals Automatically with KNIME — Medium — Low Code for Data Science.
- May 2025 2025 Annual Meeting Report: NAMs Hit the Bullseye in DART Assessments — SOT ToXchange.
- April 2025 Scientific Journeys: From avid reader to toxicity tool developer — NIEHS Environmental Factor.
- April 2025 SOT meeting summary — News in Brief — NIEHS Environmental Factor.
- March 2025 Outstanding undergraduate researchers recognized by SOT — SOT ToXchange.
- February 2025 ESTIV–ASCCT Award Winners Series — European Society of Toxicology In Vitro.
- January 2025 Intramural Papers of the Month — NIEHS Environmental Factor.
- December 2024 Undergrads test science communication skills at fall event — NIEHS Environmental Factor.
- November 2024 Microplastics and trainee development headline toxicology meeting — NIEHS Environmental Factor.
- September 2024 Undergrads share research projects from NIEHS summer internship — NIEHS Environmental Factor.
- 2024 Complement-ARIE Challenge Prize Winner Summaries — NIH Common Fund.
- April 2023 Undergraduate student receives 2023 Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship from NIST — UNC McAllister Heart Institute.
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