Meet Our Fellows: Benedikt Singer

"ChatGPT, DALL-E and my research project have one thing in common: They all rely on the cutting-edge research of deep learning and offer a exciting future in their individual domains. Given a pre-trained model which understands the connection between the sequence of a protein - the basic building blocks and machines of every living organism - and its structure, I try to make it an expert (fine-tune it to be precise) on the problem of antibody-target interactions. Antibodies play a vital role in the immune system and being able to predict whether or not an antibody - only given the sequence - binds a target (e.g. the newest Covid variant) has numerous clinical application is also an exciting proof of concept.

Thanks to the Austrian Marshall Plan Foundation and the Austrian taxpayers I am able to enjoy the supportive working environment at the Institute of Protein Design (IPD) in the group of David Baker - a great supervisor and a coryphee in the field of protein design. The institute can be found at the campus of the University of Washington which is located in the middle of Seattle (WA) - a city known for its thriving technology hub with the headquarters of both Amazon and Microsoft nearby."