A small molecule in your morning coffee changes how alert you feel by binding to a protein in your brain. Understanding that interaction takes us from DNA to molecular machines and to some of the most interesting problems in AI.
We’ll explore what makes DNA digital, how its four-letter alphabet encodes proteins, and how a one-dimensional sequence becomes a three-dimensional structure. Along the way, we’ll meet molecular machines that rotate, relay signals, and control the movement of ions across cell membranes.
We’ll then connect these biological problems to familiar ideas in AI: learning representations from sequences, predicting molecular structures, searching chemical space, and generating new proteins. We’ll discuss what these models can already do, where experiments remain essential, and the open problems that AI researchers and builders can help tackle.
About Speaker:
Amit U Sinha is the founder and CEO of Basepair, an agentic genomics platform that helps scientists make sense of data.
Amit has a PhD in ML and genomics. He worked in cancer biology at Harvard Medical School and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, focusing on epigenetic reprogramming in leukemia. He has more than 40 publications in Nature, Science, Cancer Cell, etc. He was previously CTO at HistoWiz, a YC-funded digital histopathology startup. He is also a scientific advisor to The 10,000 Brains Project.
Join online: meet.google.com/jkr-fzse-svv
Looking forward to seeing you!
