Pollard Lecture set for Oct. 8
Dorothee Kern, Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and professor of integrative structural and computational biology at Scripps Research, will present the 2026 Ernest C. Pollard Lecture in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, titled “The Protein Dance: From Experiments to AI Predictions,” at 12:10 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 8, in 008 Mueller Laboratory on the Penn State University Park campus. This free public lecture is sponsored by the Penn State Eberly College of Science.
The Protein Dance: From Experiments to AI Predictions
Why can we not design efficient enzymes or highly selective drugs to date? While one can solve high-resolution structures of ground states experimentally and even now predict them with the AlphaFold artificial intelligence system, for biological function, proteins need to traverse the entire energy landscape from the lowest energy state over the transition states into higher energy states.
Kern will first share novel approaches to visualizing the structures of transition-state ensembles, which has been stymied due to their fleeting nature, despite their crucial role in dictating the speed of biological processes. Then she will describe a new general method to determine high-resolution structures of high-energy states that are often the biologically reactive species. Given that protein dynamics is dictating biological function, but the experiments are very time consuming, Kern will discuss two new generative AI models her research group recently trained: a new method, called AF-cluster, to predict multiple protein conformations; and Dyna-1, their machine-learning model to predict protein dynamics on the micro-to-millisecond scale. Curated nuclear magnetic resonance imaging data, combined with a large training-data set, were used as experimental input to train a classifier using several protein language models; and the resulting new dynamics model has the strongest predictive power for motions directly linked to biological function. Finally, Kern will discuss visions — and success — for putting protein dynamics at the heart of drug and enzyme design.
About the speaker
Dorothee Kern is a professor and investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and a member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her research has focused on protein dynamics, investigating how proteins move and change shape during biological processes, using a combination of experimental biophysics and computational methods. Her contributions have been acknowledged with the Pfizer Award in Enzyme Chemistry from the American Chemical Society and the Dayhoff Award from the Biophysical Society, among others. She is also the founder of Relay Therapeutics and MOMA Therapeutics, with the mission of exploiting protein dynamics and allosteric networks for improving drug design and therapeutics.
About the Pollard Lecture
The Ernest. C. Pollard Lecture honors Ernest C. Pollard, who founded the Penn State Department of Biophysics in 1961. The biophysics department merged with the microbiology and biochemistry departments to form the present Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. The purpose of the lecture is to foster research in biophysics and molecular biology through a seminar by an internationally recognized scientist.