Huafeng Xu

Huafeng Xu is CEO and co-founder of Fathom Therapeutics, a New York–headquartered company transforming drug discovery by unifying AI and physics in its proprietary platform, Microcosmos, a world model of drugs in cells. Microcosmos bridges quantum-level molecular interactions with cellular outcomes, enabling the design of medicines that control biological function. Fathom advances its own pipeline and maintains multiple discovery partnerships. Prior to Fathom, Huafeng served as CTO of Silicon Therapeutics, where he pioneered computational approaches to drug design before its acquisition by Roivant, and later as CTO of Roivant Discovery. Earlier in his career at D. E. Shaw Research, he contributed to the creation of the Anton supercomputer, extending molecular dynamics simulations to biologically relevant timescales, and led the development of software for predicting drug–protein binding affinities that was later licensed by Schrödinger and evolved into FEP+, now an industry standard. He earned his B.S. from Peking University and his M.S. and Ph.D. from Columbia University, and was a visiting postdoctoral scholar at University of California, San Francisco. In his spare time, Huafeng enjoys wine and solving math problems, sometimes simultaneously.