Are you passionate about deep learning and excited about its potential to transform drug discovery? We are looking for a talented postdoctoral researcher to join our ERC-funded project at TU Eindhoven, where we develop cutting-edge deep learning methods for protein representation and small-molecule drug discovery.
Proteins play a crucial role as mediators of the therapeutic potential of molecules. Capturing meaningful information on proteins with AI has an enormous potential in drug discovery and chemical biology,
e.g., for structure-based drug discovery and polypharmacology. Despite such potential, strategies to capture sophisticated information on protein structure with deep learning are underexplored compared to small molecules.
This ERC-funded project has the ambitious goal to develop new AI strategies to learn efficiently from protein structures, to ultimately accelerate small molecule drug discovery. The project will be fueled by methodological innovation and aimed to leverage large corpora of protein data with cutting-edge deep learning algorithms. The developed approaches will be applied experimentally for structure-based drug discovery, thereby providing a unique opportunity to validate the AI predictions in a real-world setting.
Information Your tasks will include:
- Developing and implementing innovative representation learning algorithms (e.g., using geometric deep learning and/or multimodal approaches) to capture sophisticated structural information for structure-based drug discovery.
- Implementing cutting-edge deep learning approaches to efficiently learn from large corpora of protein structures.
- Collaborating and interacting with ongoing research in deep learning for drug discovery, as well as in medicinal chemistry and chemical biology.
- Mentoring and supervising junior researchers and students who are working on deep-learning-assisted drug discovery.
- Communicating the results of your research through publications in scientific journals and presentations at conferences.
You will work at the interface between deep learning, chemistry, and biology, with a proactive and interdisciplinary attitude. You will become a member of the Molecular Machine Learning
group (led by Prof. Francesca Grisoni), whose mission is to augment human intelligence in drug discovery with novel computational technology. You will also be embedded in the Chemical Biology cluster, the Department of Biomedical Engineering, the Institute for Complex Molecular Systems, and the Eindhoven AI Systems Institute – characterized by a highly interdisciplinary and collaborative approach to science and research.