William Kearns

Dr. William G. Kearns has spent three decades at the frontier where genetics, artificial intelligence, and molecular medicine meet — the same frontier where the line between a tool that heals and a weapon that kills is thinner than most people are permitted to know.

A molecular geneticist with 35 years in genomics and a former professor at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, he holds AI credentials from MIT's Schwarzman College of Computing and has authored more than 200 peer-reviewed papers. His published work identifying real drug targets using multiomics and digital-twin methodology is the same science that drives the plots of his fiction. He is the founder and CEO of Lugenica, a genomics and AI company in Maryland.

He turned to the thriller because the questions he confronts in the laboratory — who controls these technologies, and to what end — are too urgent to leave inside a journal, and because a story can carry a warning into places a citation never reaches. The genomics is real. The AI is real. The dilemmas are the ones his field is wrestling with right now.

The Helix Conspiracy is part of the Detective Sara Voss series, which began with the prequel The Meridian Girls.

He lives with his wife in Maryland.