Vladimir Vacić - vacic.org

I was born and grew up in Belgrade, Serbia. I graduated from the School of Mathematics (Matematička gimnazija) and spent a year at the University of Belgrade's Faculty of Architecture.

In 1998 I moved to the United States for college: first to Bridgeport, then to Philadelphia, and finally to Riverside, where I defended my Ph.D. in Computer Science exactly ten years and a day after I first arrived in the US. Along the way I interned for about half a year each in Indianapolis and Princeton. Between the moves for school and the internships, I did my fair share of driving across the country.

In 2008 I moved to New York for a postdoc at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (statistical genetics, psychiatry, neurodevelopment), then at Columbia (statistical genetics, neurodegeneration). From 2012 to 2015 I worked at the New York Genome Center, where I was one of the founding scientists, saw the center grow from 20 to 160 people, and ended up managing a cancer genomics group.

In 2015 I switched coasts again and moved to San Francisco. I joined the 23andMe Therapeutics Division shortly after it was founded and stayed until it was dissolved in the second half of 2024. I've seen 23andMe grow from about 200 employees to more than 800, enter an exclusive 5-year drug discovery collaboration with GSK, get listed on Nasdaq, acquire Lemonaid Health, shed 99% of its value and 80% of its employees, file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and get delisted from Nasdaq. All I can say is, what a ride. Wonderful people, world-class science, more data than time to analyze it, and unfortunately, a textbook example of founder's syndrome, which eventually led to the company's bankruptcy.

I love maps, and these are some I've made: