AlphaFold: A scientific journey from mathematics to biology
Jonas Adler, a KTH alumni who is part of the DeepMind team that developed AlphaFold, will give an informal talk on December 9 about his work on AlphaFold. The presentation (in English) is aimed at both students and faculty and seeks to provide a personal narrative about the development of AlphaFold, which is one of the first truly groundbreaking applications of AI in the natural sciences.
Time: Mon 2024-12-09 12.00 - 13.00
Location: E1, Osquars backe 2 (eller Lindstedtsvägen 3)
Contact:
The protein folding problem has been one of the most famous problems in biology for more than 50 years. I first encountered it as an undergraduate student, lending time on my gaming computer to Folding@home to help it solve the structures of a few important proteins. Little did I know how the field would progress over the next decade. In this talk I'll give an account of a personal journey that started 15 years ago at KTH ended with me joining DeepMind and contributing to AlphaFold. I'll explain what protein folding is, why solving it is so important and what it took for us to crack the problem.
Short bio about Jonas:
Jonas is a Senior Staff Research Scientist at Google DeepMind where he was a core contributor to AlphaFold, he currently works in the Gemini team. He has a MSc in Engineering physics from KTH and did his PhD in 2019 at the Department of Mathematics, KTH on deep learning based methods for tomographic image reconstruction.