Speaker Series Schedule

Every other Tuesday 4-5pm EST unless otherwise noted

2024 Schedule:

February 6th — Nabil Ibtehaz, PhD student (Purdue)

Domain-PFP allows protein function prediction using function-aware domain embedding representations

Presentation Recording

February 20th — Tianhao Yu, PhD student (UIUC)

Enzyme function prediction using contrastive learning

Presentation Recording

March 5th — GoCurator group (Fudan University)

CAFA5 Protein Function Prediction via Kaggle

*** note special time for talk at 7PM, EST

Presentation Recording

March 19th — Alexander Kroll, PhD student (Heinrich Heine University)

A general model to predict small molecule substrates of enzymes based on machine and deep learning

Presentation Recording

April 2nd— Zhangzhi Peng, PhD student (Duke)

PTM-Mamba: A PTM-Aware Protein Language Model with Bidirectional Gated Mamba Blocks

Presentation Recording

April 16th — Eric Nguyen, PhD student and Brian Hie, PhD (Stanford)

Sequence modeling and design from molecular to genome scale with Evo

Presentation Recording

May 7th— Jeff Ruffolo, PhD and Stephen Nayfach, PhD

Design of highly functional genome editors by modeling the universe of CRISPR-Cas sequences

Presentation Recording

May 28th — Zaixiang Zheng, PhD (ByteDance Research)

Diffusion Language Models Are Versatile Protein Learners

Presentation Recording

June 18th— Kieran Didi, MSc, Simon Mathis, PhD student and Francisco Vargas, PhD student (Cambridge)

A framework for conditional diffusion modelling with applications in motif scaffolding for protein design

Presentation Recording

July 2nd— Yeqing Lin, PhD student and Minji Lee, PhD student (Columbia)

Out of Many, One: Designing and Scaffolding Proteins at the Scale of the Structural Universe with Genie 2

Presentation Recording

July 9th — Neil Thomas + David Belanger

Engineering highly active and diverse nuclease enzymes by combining machine learning and ultra-high-throughput screening

Presentation Recording

July 16th — Francesca-Zhoufan Li, PhD student (CalTech)

Feature Reuse and Scaling: Understanding Transfer Learning with Protein Language Models

(No recording publicly available)

July 23rd — Roshan Rao, PhD (EvolutionaryScale)

ESM3: Simulating 500 million years of evolution with a language model

Presentation Recording

July 30th — Jason Yang, PhD student (CalTech)

CARE: a Benchmark Suite for the Classification and Retrieval of Enzymes

Presentation Recording

August 6th— Alex Tong, PhD (Mila) and Guillaume Huguet, PhD (Université de Montréal)

Sequence-Augmented SE (3)-Flow Matching For Conditional Protein Backbone Generation

September 3rd — Kaiyi Jiang, PhD Candidate (MIT)

Rapid protein evolution by few-shot learning with a protein language model

September 17th — Jeff Ruffolo, PhD (Profluent Bio)

Adapting protein language models for structure-conditioned design

October 1st — Amy Lu, PhD student (UC Berkeley)

Tokenized and Continuous Embedding Compressions of Protein Sequence and Structure

October 15th — Kapil Devkota, PhD (Duke)

Template-based protein editing using Raygun

October 29th — Andre Cornman, PhD (Tatta Bio)

The OMG dataset: An Open MetaGenomic corpus for mixed-modality genomic language modeling

November 12th — Arda Goreci (Ligo Biosciences)

Lessons from implementing AlphaFold3 in the wild

November 19th — Will Hua (McGill University)

AI-Assisted De Novo Enzyme Design

November 26th — Jin Su (Westlake University)

ProTrek: Navigating the Protein Universe through Tri-Modal Contrastive Learning

December 12th — Jacob Gershon, Sidney Lisanza & Sam Tipps (University of Washington)

Multistate and functional protein design using RoseTTAFold sequence space diffusion

2023 Archived Schedule:

January - March 2023

Jan 17th — Emily Makowski, PhD— University of Michigan
Multi-objective engineering of therapeutic antibodies

Presentation Recording

Jan 31st — Gina El Nesr — PhD Student, Stanford University
Singular value decomposition of protein sequences as a method to visualize sequence and residue space

Presentation Recording

Feb 14th — Joe Watson, PhD  & David Juergens — Institute for Protein Design, University of Washington

Broadly applicable and accurate protein design by integrating structure prediction networks and diffusion generative models

Presentation Recording

Feb 28th— Samantha Petti, PhD — Postdoctoral Fellow, Harvard

End-to-end learning of multiple sequence alignments with differentiable Smith-Waterman

Presentation Recording

March 14th— Zhuoran Qiao, PhD — Lead ML Scientist, Entos Inc.

Dynamic-backbone protein-ligand complex structure prediction with multiscale generative diffusion models

Presentation Recording

March 28th— Simon Dürr — PhD Candidate , EPFL

Deploying protein machine learning models on the web

Presentation Recording

April - June 2023

April 11— Pascal Notin — PhD Candidate , University of Oxford

Hybrid protein language models for fitness prediction

Presentation Recording

April 25— Jacob Rapp — PhD Candidate , UW-Madison

A Self-Driving Laboratory System for Protein Engineering

Presentation Recording

May 9— Simon Kozlov, Stephen Rettie — U of Washington and Harvard

Cyclic peptide structure prediction and design using AlphaFold

Presentation Recording

May 23— Hannah Wayment-Steele, PhD — Brandeis University

Predicting (and discovering) proteins with multiple conformational states

Presentation Recording

June 6— David Ding, PhD — Harvard and UC Berkeley

Site-wise mutation effects enable combinatorial protein variant design

Presentation Recording

June 20 — Sam Gelman — PhD candidate, UW-Madison

Open-source use of METL models for proteins

Presentation Recording

September - November 2023

September 19 — Kevin Yang, PhD — Senior Researcher, Microsoft

Protein generation with evolutionary diffusion: sequence is all you need

Presentation Recording

September 26 — Nathan Frey, PhD — ML Scientist, Prescient Design

Protein Discovery with Discrete Walk-Jump Sampling

Presentation Recording

October 3 — Kotaro Tsuboyama, PhD — Institute of Industrial Science (IIS), UTokyo

Mega-scale experimental analysis of protein folding stability in biology and design

*** note special time for talk at 7PM, EST

Presentation Recording

October 10 — Karolis Martinkus, PhD — Machine Learning Scientist, Prescient Design, Genentech, Roche

AbDiffuser: Full-Atom Generation of In-Vitro Functioning Antibodies

Presentation Recording

October 17 — Stephanie A. Wankowicz, PhD — Scientist, UCSF

Uncovering Protein Ensembles: Automated Multiconformer Model Building for X-ray Crystallography and Cryo-EM

Presentation Recording

October 31 — Craig J. Markin, PhD — Research Scientist, Stanford

Decoupling of catalysis and transition state analog binding from mutations throughout a phosphatase revealed by high-throughput enzymology

Presentation Recording

November 14th — Samuel Stanton, PhD (Prescient Design) + Nate Gruver (PhD student, NYU)

Protein Design with Guided Discrete Diffusion

Presentation Recording

November 28th — Zaixiang Zheng, PhD — ByteDance Research

Structure-informed Language Models Are Protein Designers

2022 Archived Schedule:


February - March 2022

Feb 1st — Eli Weinstein — PhD Candidate, Harvard Biophysics
Optimal Design of Stochastic DNA Synthesis Protocols based on Generative Sequence Models

Presentation Recording

Feb 15th — Bruce Wittman — PhD Candidate, Caltech Bioengineering
Machine Learning-Assisted Protein Engineering with ftMLDE and evSeq
+ introduction by Prof. Frances Arnold

Presentation Recording


March 1st — Chloe Hsu — PhD Student, UC Berkeley
Learning Protein Fitness Models from Evolutionary and Experimental Data

Presentation Recording

March 15th — Erika Alden DeBenedictis — Postdoc, University of Washington
Systematic molecular evolution using PRANCE

Presentation Recording


March 22nd —
Moderated discussion panel with all speakers



April - May 2022

April 5th — Doug Tischer — Postdoc, University of Washington
David Juergens — PhD Candidate, University of Washington

Scaffolding protein functional sites using deep learning

Presentation Recording

April 19th — Wengong Jin — Postdoc, Broad Institute
Iterative Refinement Graph Neural Network for Antibody Docking and Design

Presentation Recording

May 3rd — Noelia Ferruz — Postdoc, University of Bayreuth
A Deep Unsupervised Language Model for Protein Design

Presentation Recording

May 17th — Moderated discussion panel with all speakers

June - July 2022

June 7th — Brian Hie — Stanford Science Fellow, Stanford & Visiting Researcher, Meta AI
Efficient evolution of human antibodies from general protein language models and sequence information alone

Presentation Recording


June 21st — Danny Diaz — PhD Candidate, UT Austin
Engineering Proteins with 3D Convolutional Neural Networks

Presentation Recording

July 5th — Gabriel Foley — Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Queensland
Engineering indel and substitution variants of diverse and ancient enzymes using Graphical Representation of Ancestral Sequence Predictions (GRASP)

Presentation Recording

July 19th — Moderated discussion panel with all speakers


Aug - Sep 2022

Aug 2nd — Namrata Anand — PhD Graduate, Stanford
Protein Structure and Sequence Generation with Equivariant Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models

Presentation Recording

Sep 6th — Brian Trippe, Columbia University & University of Washington+ Jason Yim, MIT 
Diffusion probabilistic modeling of protein backbones in 3D for the motif-scaffolding problem

Presentation Recording


Sep 20th — Justas Dauparas, University of Washington
Robust deep learning based protein sequence design using ProteinMPNN

Presentation Recording

Sep 27th — Moderated discussion panel with all speakers

Oct - Nov 2022

Oct 4th — Jonathan Greenhalgh, PhD— Data Scientist, A-Alpha Bio
Machine-learning guided engineering of fatty acyl-ACP reductases

Presentation Recording

Oct 18th — Clara Wong-Fannjiang — PhD Candidate, UC Berkeley
Conformal prediction for the design problem

Presentation Recording


Nov 1st — Daniel Berenberg — PhD Candidate, New York University

Multi-segment preserving sampling for deep manifold sampler
Presentation Recording

Nov 15th — Moderated discussion panel with all speakers