148. Three faces of the same problem – Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024

Abstract:

During the seminar I will introduce and discuss this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry winners and their research. The Prize was awarded to David Baker for protein design and to Demis Hassabis + John Jumper for protein structure prediction. Both breakthroughs at the intersection of chemistry, biology and medicine came to be because of AI… or did they?! I will try to focus on answering questions how this was possible, why now and why these people? To try and explain better not only the ground-breaking discoveries, but also how decades of research culminated in this prize.

About the author:

Tomasz obtained his M.Sc. in chemistry from Jagiellonian University in 2010 and a PhD in biological sciences from University College London (UK) in 2016. In years 2016-2019 he was a post-doctoral research associate in Rob Knight’s group at University of California San Diego (USA) and 2019-2023 we was a group leader in bioinformatics at the Małopolska Centre of Biotechnology, Jagiellonian University in Kraków. 2023-2024 he was a university professor at the Silesian University of Technology in Gliwice, employed from the Excellence Initiative – Research University programme. Since 2024 he is a Group Leader at Sano – Centre for Computational Medicine in Kraków. Tomasz is also a co-founder of onebiome, LLC. He is working on the development and application of computational methods to better understand the function and dynamics of the human gut microbiome. He has contributed to the development of a suite of tools commonly used in microbiome analyses – QIIME 2 and Qiita – and he is also working on state-of-the-art machine learning and statistical methods to predict protein function (deepFRI) or to model the dysbiosis and dynamics of the microbiome. The goal of his group is to build a multi-level understanding of the microbiome from genes, through structures, to functions and therapies.