Biography
Throughout his PhD and postdoctoral studies he was trained in world-renowned laboratories and institutions in the United States of America (University of Washington and The Scripps Research Institute).
Very early in his scientific career he found out his fascination about protein structure and function.
His PhD studies evolved in the direction of immunogen design and vaccine engineering which sparked his interest in the many needs and opportunities in vaccinology and translational research. His efforts resulted in an enlightening piece of work where for the first time, computationally designed immunogens elicited potent neutralizing antibodies. During his postdoctoral studies he joined a chemical biology laboratory at the Scripps Research Institute. In this stage he developed novel chemoproteomics methods for the identification of protein-small molecule interaction sites in complex proteomes.
In March 2015, he joined the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) – Switzerland as a tenure track assistant professor. The focus of his research group is to develop computational tools for protein design with particular emphasis in applying these strategies to immunoengineering (e.g. vaccine and cancer immunotherapy). The activities in his laboratory focus on computational design methods development and experimental characterization of the designed proteins.
Our laboratory has been awarded with 2 prestigious research grants from the European Research Council. Lastly, he has been awarded the prize for best teacher of Life sciences in 2019.
Topic
Advances in AI Enabled Peptide Design: Structural Trends and the Expanding Role of AlphaFold