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Scientific Program

Scientific Program – 2025 Carolina Biophysics Symposium

Thursday, November 6, 2025  

8:00 – 8:50 AM:  Registration   

8:50 AM:  Welcoming remarks   

9:00 – 11:40 AM: Computational Methods for Protein Design (session chair: Pranam Chatterjee)   

  • 9:00 – 9:30: Rohit Singh (Duke University)  
  • 9:30 – 9:45: Xingcheng Lin (NC State)
    • “Integrating Sparse Sequence, Experimental, and AI-Predicted Structures to Advance Protein-Nucleic Acid InteractionPrediction and Design”
  • 9:45 – 10:15:  Pranam Chatterjee (Penn)  
    • “Design of Programmable Biologics with Generative Sequence Models”  
  • 10:15 – 10:40 AM: Break   
  • 10:40 – 11:10:  Alex Tong (Aithyra)  
  • 11:10 – 11:40: Nathan Frey (Prescient Design)  
    • “Lab-in-the-loop for therapeutic antibody design with deep learning”  

11:40 – 12:45 PM: Lunch   

12:45 – 1:50 PM: Poster Session   

2:00 – 5:15 PM: Design and Engineering of Protein Therapeutics (session chair: Huong Kratochvil)   

  • 2:00 – 2:30: Brian Kuhlman (UNC Chapel Hill)  
    • “Design of Protein-Based Vaccines for Dengue virus” 
  • 2:30 – 3:00: William DeGrado (UC San Francisco) 
    • “De Novo Design of Functional Proteins”  
  • 3:00 – 3:30: Anum Glasgow (Columbia University)   
    • “Quantifying aberrant protein dynamics to guide therapeutics design”  
  • 3:30 – 4:00: Break   
  • 4:00 – 4:30:  Joanna Slusky (University of Kansas)  
    • “Protein Design Insights From Large Datasets”
  • 4:30 – 4:45: Nathan Blalock (Duke University)
    • “Machine learning-guided olivetolic acid cyclase engineering enables tailored cannabinoid biosynthesis in yeast”
  • 4:45 – 5:15: Dany Kim-Shapiro (Wake Forest University)  
    • “NO-Ferroheme in Heme-Protein based Therapeutics”  

Friday, November 7, 2025   

 9:00 AM – 12:10 PM: Experimental Methods for Protein Engineering (session chair: Balaji Rao)   

  • 9:00 – 9:30: Emma Chory (Duke University)  
    • “Navigating the Evolution Multiverse: A real-time platform for tracking evolution outcomes”
  • 9:30 – 9:45:  Caleb Fisher (UNC)
    • “NAPA-seq: a genomic assay to decipher a nucleosome hot spot genome-wide”
  • 9:45 – 10:15:  Gabe Rocklin (Northwestern University)  
    • “Large-scale discovery of protein stability and dynamics”
  • 10:15 – 10:40: Break   
  • 10:40 – 11:10: Amy Keating (MIT)  
    • “Mapping protein-peptide interactions with proteome screening and photocrosslinking”  
  • 11:10 – 11:40: Albert Bowers (UNC)  
    • “Exploring Post-translational Enzymology by mRNA Display”
  • 11:40 – 12:10: Bala Rao (NC State) 
    • “High throughput discovery and quantification of protein-protein/enzyme-substrate interactions using yeast surface display”

12:10 – 1:00 PM:  Lunch 

1:00 – 1:50 PM: Poster Session   

2:00 – 4:45 PM: Protein-based Biosensors and Actuators (session chair: Katherine Albanese)   

  • 2:00 – 2:30:  Katherine Albanese (Wake Forest University)  
    • “Computational protein design for histone epigenetic biology”
  • 2:30 – 2:45:  Nathan Ennist (NC State)
    • “Engineering new proteins for enhanced photosynthesis”
  • 2:45 – 3:15: Huong Kratochvil (UNC Chapel Hill)  
    • “Programmable Oligomerization for the Design of Immunomodulatory Proteins”
  • 3:15 – 3:45: Break   
  • 3:45 – 4:15: Hannah Wayment-Steele (University of Wisconsin)  
    • “Learning millisecond motions from what is missing in NMR data”  
  • 4:15 – 4:45: Klaus Hahn (UNC Chapel Hill)  
    • “Single molecule imaging of protein conformational dynamics in living cells”