Zubair Talib — HTBAA Fall 2026

About me

I’m Zubair Talib. I studied EE/CS at MIT in the 90’s. My master’s work was at MTL, building an image processing system for driverless vehicles. After presenting our work at an Intelligent Vehicle Control conference in the mid-90’s, I was certain we were late to market. :)

Since then I’ve spent my career in AI and software: enterprise search and information retrieval before Google, conversational AI for hiring, and LLM-based voice agents before ChatGPT. Today I run Celara, an AI and technology services company. I also do advisory work and special projects through Unigram Labs.

I’m completely new to biology. I’ve become fascinated by the combination of AI protein design models and automated wet labs, and I’m excited to learn about all aspects of synthetic biology.

My current interest is quite specific. My wife and two daughters all have celiac disease, an autoimmune condition that makes them react to gluten: wheat, bread, pasta, soy sauce. We love Asian food, and eating out is a constant challenge.

I’m interested in anything that improves the condition and ultimately solves celiac. For now my ambitions as a non-biologist are more modest: a reliable gluten detector so we can eat out safely.

Contact info

• Email

Homework, Labs, and Projects

See the nav bar on the left to look through my work for How To Biomanufacture Almost Anything (Fall 2026)!