Nathan Rollins

My mission is to translate the immense capabilities of biomolecules into human applications.

While keeping one foot in academia, I am a senior scientist at Seismic Therapeutic, a biomedicine startup launched out of my PhD and post-doc work with Debora Marks. At Seismic, my role is to develop machine learning methods for accelerating discovery and improving properties of protein therapeutics. To this end, as throughout my career, I work in equal parts as a synthetic biologist and as a computer scientist.

The themes of my work are symmetric: (1) Identify challenges in bioscience & design ML solutions in response. (2) Identify opportunities in bioscience unlocked by ML & design wetlab experiments to take full advantage.

I started on this path ten years ago, designing de novo proteins at the UW Institute for Protein Design, while I studied chemical engineering and biochemistry. I then pursued a PhD in Engineering and Physics in Biology, supervised jointly by computational biologist Debora Marks and synthetic biologist Pamela Silver. In that time, I gained a fantastic breadth of experience - advancing projects to: design enzymes [1], drugs [2], and more [3,4,5]; predict virus evolution [6,7,8,9,10]; and to maximize what's learned from next-gen wetlab methods such as deep mutational scanning [11,12].

To learn more, see my papers on Google Scholar.

October 2023