About Us - The Dark Protein Project's Founder

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Shawnak Shivakumar

Founder & CEO

Paul Thomas

ACTING CFO, KOMODO HEALTH

We’re proud to have Paul Thomas, Acting CFO at Komodo Health as an advisor!

We are now integrating thousands of community-generated protein annotations into advanced biological analytics and linking global citizen science with real-world healthcare insights.

Shawnak founded The Dark Protein Project in 2024 to make the world’s uncharted proteins accessible to scientists, students, and citizen researchers alike. His work focuses on bridging computational biology and open data, turning complex molecular problems into collaborative discovery.

Paul Thomas at Komodo Health is advising The Dark Protein Project to expand the reach of open biomedical data and accelerate early-stage discovery. Together, we’re connecting real-world health analytics with protein-level understanding: turning data into impact.

Our Story and Purpose

Founded in 2024, The Dark Protein Project began with a single mission: to map the invisible half of biology. With over 250 million uncharacterized proteins across known genomes, much of life’s molecular architecture remains unexplored: the “dark proteome.”

We built this platform to change that. By combining citizen science with machine learning, The Dark Protein Project transforms complex protein structures into interactive 3D puzzles that anyone can help solve. Each annotation made by our users brings clarity to this hidden frontier: advancing global research in drug discovery, evolution, and health.