Alex J. Li

Hi, I’m Alex! I’m a third year graduate student in the UC Berkeley - UCSF Joint Bioengineering PhD Program co-advised by Prof. Tanja Kortemme and Prof. Margaux Pinney, and am generously supported by the NSF GRFP and the UCSF Discovery Fellows program. I am primarily interested in developing machine learning methods to accelerate protein design, with a particular focus on de novo enzyme design.

Previously, I received a SB in Chemistry with a Focus in Applied Machine Learning from MIT in 2022. During my undergrad, I worked on

• organic synthesis: synthesizing extended rigid \(\pi\)-conjugated helical structures for optomagnetic materials.
• automated wet-lab experiment analysis: using Bayesian inference and differentiable programming to simulate and analyze wet lab experiments with automatic uncertainty quantification
• machine learning for protein design: combining tertiary motifs (TERMs) with energy-based modeling to improve graph-based protein design models.

I’m generally interested in the ways we can apply computation and scientific intuition to assist and accelerate biochemical scientific discovery. Feel free to reach out if you want to chat!