Nellie Kolon

Founding Engineer at Deleon Technologies

I’m a biochemist and biomedical engineer. At Deleon, I lead R&D on the lab side of an AI research company that measures human metabolism at home, every day. Before that, I spent three years developing lipid nanoparticle medicines at Eli Lilly.

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Now

Deleon Technologies

Founding Engineer · Atlanta, GA · September 2025 – present

Deleon is an AI research company building models and autonomous instruments to learn human biology. Its at-home instrument, Otea, takes a daily measurement of a person’s metabolism, so a model can predict how the body will respond to an intervention and check that prediction the same day.

My role:

Lead R&D for the lab, from assay design to the chemical data our models train on.
Lead development of a microfluidic capillary electrophoresis assay with laser-induced fluorescence detection (CE-LIF) that generates quantitative metabolite measurements.
Act as the biology domain expert for our ML engineers, translating metabolic pathways and physiology into model design.
Hired, trained, and manage our research interns.
Use AI-assisted, human-in-the-loop optimization to choose what the lab tests next.

The Deleon team standing outside the office — The Deleon team in Atlanta.

Nellie looking through a stereo microscope in the lab — At the microscope in the Deleon lab.

Before Deleon

Experience

2024 – 2025

Graduate Student Researcher

Georgia Institute of Technology, Ackun-Farmmer Lab

Designed peptide-targeted polymer nanoparticles to reprogram T cell responses, cut a synthesis process from 10 hours to 30 minutes, and mentored an undergraduate researcher.

2021 – 2024

Senior Research Associate, Genetic Medicine

Eli Lilly and Company, Cambridge, MA

Built a high-throughput platform that formulated and characterized 100+ lipid nanoparticles a week for nucleic acid delivery to the brain, used Design of Experiments to guide formulation, and developed scale-up methods with microfluidic mixing and tangential flow filtration.

Nellie in a Lilly lab coat, safety glasses, and gloves in the lab — In the lab at Lilly, Cambridge

2019

Analytical Chemistry Co-op

Takeda Pharmaceuticals, Cambridge, MA

Ran purity, stability, and solubility assays on oncology drug candidates and presented an in vivo ELISA study to 50+ scientists.

Education

2025

M.S. Biomedical Engineering

Georgia Institute of Technology

2021

B.S. Biochemistry, Magna Cum Laude

Northeastern University

Publications

Biomaterial-mediated immunomodulation of regulatory T cells in cancer Hengen, A.C.; Kolon, H.; Ackun-Farmmer, M.A. Biomaterials Science, 2026
How Participation in a Research Experiences for Undergraduates Program (REU) Transforms Chemistry and Biochemistry Majors’ Understanding of Research and Scientific Inquiry Kolon, H.; Mabrouk, P.A. Journal of Chemical Education, 2022 · Editor’s Choice