Speakers
Anjan Venkatesh, Max Bonomi, Andy Kilianski, Ernest Mordret
QBI UCSF, Institut Pasteur, and Gladstone Institutes present the "Infectious Insights Webinar Series" to promote knowledge exchange and collaboration in infectious disease research. The series unites experts from various institutions to tackle emerging challenges, share breakthroughs, and explore innovative solutions, reinforcing the partnership’s commitment to advancing global science.
AI Meets Protein Interactions: From Mapping to Prediction
Protein-protein interactions underlie nearly every cellular process, from signaling and immune recognition to the way pathogens hijack host machinery. Advances in experimental mapping, integrative structural modeling, and machine learning are rapidly changing how these interactions are discovered, modeled, and understood.
This webinar will bring together perspectives on large-scale interaction mapping and computational prediction of protein complexes and their interfaces. The session aims to foster interdisciplinary discussion and collaborative approaches to link experimental and computational strategies, and to leverage them to better understand disease mechanisms and accelerate the development of new therapeutics.
The webinar is free and open to all, with no registration required.
Join the meeting here: https://ucsf.zoom.us/j/91650091271?pwd=frbxLXfi0ebB0VDKe1ig5LUPQ4GZrY.1
9:00 AM PST/5:00 PM CET: Introduction by moderator:
Andy Kilianski, Chief Science and Technology Officer, QBI UCSF
9:10 AM PST/5:10 PM CET:
Ernest Mordret, Postdoctoral Researcher, Bernheim Lab, Institut Pasteur
Talk Title: "Protein and genomic language models uncover the unexplored diversity of bacterial immunity"
9:30 AM PST/5:30 PM CET:
Anjan Venkatesh, Postdoctoral Researcher, Krogan Lab, UC San Francisco
Talk Title: "A mimicry-based approach to identifying novel effector-human interactions across bacterial species"
9:50 AM PST/5:50 PM CET:
Max Bonomi, Head of the Computational Structural Biology lab, Institut Pasteur
Talk Title: "Protein-protein interactions: from integrative structural biology to protein design"
10:10 AM PST/6:10 PM CET: Open discussion (20 mins)
Andy Kilianski
Andy Kilianski is Chief Technology Officer at the Quantitative Biosciences Institute (QBI) at UCSF. He previously served as a Program Manager and Deputy Director of the Health Science Futures Mission Office at ARPA-H, where he oversaw more than $1 billion in research and development investments.
His work focuses on biomedical innovation, pandemic preparedness, and translational research, with experience spanning vaccine, therapeutic, and diagnostic development, national security, and global health. At QBI, he leads technology strategy and industry engagement to advance disease-agnostic drug discovery and pandemic preparedness.
Anjan Venkatesh
Anjan Venkatesh is a postdoctoral researcher in the Krogan Lab at the Quantitative Biosciences Institute (QBI), UCSF, where he uses AlphaFold and related computational approaches to predict protein-protein interactions at scale and investigate their roles in cancer and infectious disease.
He completed his doctoral training at University College Dublin, studying how gene loss in cancer rewires protein interaction networks, with a particular focus on paralogous proteins. His research integrates omics-scale datasets with co-evolutionary information to build a more complete understanding of protein interaction networks.
Ernest Mordret
Ernest Mordret is a computational biologist who was originally trained as an experimental biologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, where he developed a mass spectrometry-based method to detect protein mistranslation across entire proteomes.
In Aude Bernheim’s lab, his research spans microbial evolution, protein biology, and host defense, including uncovering evolutionary links between prokaryotic and eukaryotic immune systems. He currently develops large language models to reconstruct bacterial genomes, infer the functions of unknown genes, and annotate mobile genetic elements.
Max Bonomi
Max Bonomi is a CNRS Research Director and Head of the Computational Structural Biology Unit at Institut Pasteur, Paris (France).
His research focuses on developing and applying AI-based methods for protein modeling and design, as well as integrative structural biology approaches that combine experimental data and computational simulations to investigate structure, dynamics, and function of complex biological systems.