Speaker Series Schedule

Every other Tuesday 4-5pm EST unless otherwise noted

2024 Schedule:

February- March 2024

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

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

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

Enzyme function prediction using contrastive learning

March 5th — GoCurator group (Fudan University)

CAFA5 Protein Function Prediction via Kaggle

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

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

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