Wendy's Open Notes
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A working notebook · est. 2024

Wendy's Open Notes

if you are also into health, ai, macro, and history, you will find interesting stuff here.

Open the notebook → A small paw print for Duoduo
§ 01 · who am I

A bit about me

Qinwen (Wendy) Huang

Hi, I'm Wendy. I'm an engineer by training, explorer at heart. I work on enabling AI to drastically improve how we live.

The foundational questions for getting there:

  • What actually makes a life better, if we start from what humans are really like?
  • How can AI help people live better, beyond productivity gains?
  • What would we need to build for that to be possible: better models, better data, better feedback loops, better infrastructure?

I don't have clean answers. This notebook is where I work them out.

I did my PhD in Computer Science at Duke, advised by Prof. Alberto Bartesaghi, where I worked on using AI to help us understand protein structures better. Before that, I did my undergrad in biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins. I spent time at Bain doing AI strategy and private equity work. After Bain, I built and sold AI tools to make private equity work less manual.

Outside of work, I enjoy reading, running, supporting my favorite sports teams, and spending quality time with my cat.

Some quotes I like:

Fear is the mind-killer.

— Frank Herbert, Dune

長空不礙白雲飛

— 石頭希遷
§ 03 · a little lab bench

Build a peptide

Peptides are short amino-acid chains that can signal hunger, pain, blood pressure, and more; longer ones are polypeptides, and folded functional chains are proteins. Build one—or meet a famous one.

mini mission

empty — start tapping →

Pick a famous peptide below for a tiny biology note.

Length
0 aa
Mol. weight
0 Da
Charge ~pH7
0
Hydrophobic

a peptide is just amino acids holding hands.

meet a famous peptide tap one to load its sequence + what it does
hydrophobic polar acidic (−) basic (+) special
§ 02 · the notes

Writing

§ 04 · selected work

Things I've built

theduomi 2026 · PowerPoint automationvisit

A logo-wall and competitive-landscape builder for consulting and investment decks — turning a list of companies into a polished, editable PowerPoint slide.

SlideKit 2026 · PowerPoint automationdocs

Private-equity-style PowerPoint automation software for AI agents and recurring workflows. It generates editable, brand-consistent slides from templates and structured data.

nextPYP open-source cryo-EM/ET · PhDvisit

An end-to-end, open-source platform for high-resolution cryo-EM and cryo-ET analysis — from on-the-fly processing and particle picking to refinement and classification at scale.

§ 05 · publication

Publication

nextPYP: a comprehensive and scalable platform for cryo-electron tomographyNature Methods · 2023

Makes single-particle cryo-electron tomography practical at scale: an end-to-end framework from raw tilt-series processing through high-resolution refinement and classification, designed to avoid bulky intermediate datasets.

MiLoPYP: self-supervised molecular pattern mining and particle localization in situNature Methods · 2024

Introduces a two-stage, self-supervised pipeline that mines recurring molecular patterns in crowded cryo-ET data, then localizes proteins from sparse labels—reducing manual annotation and supporting diverse molecular targets.

SmartScope: automated systematic evaluation of cryo-EM specimenseLife · 2022

Automates cryo-EM specimen screening with deep-learning feature detection and classification, plus a web interface for remote microscope control, annotation, and iterative model improvement.

Full list on Google Scholar →
§ 06 · field notes

A few field notes

Small pauses from the road: places, animals, and moments I wanted to keep.

§ 07 · connect

Connect with me

I'd love to chat. I've also done a lot of guidance and advising work, so feel free to reach out.

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