Debora Marks

Debora Marks, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School. As a mathematician and computational biologist, Marks develops novel algorithms, statistical methods and machine learning to successfully address unsolved biological problems.

Her passion is to understand, predict and design biomolecular systems in a way that impacts biomedical applications and synthetic biology at many scales, with a focus on developing new methods in probabilistic modeling that exploit the huge and increasing corpus of natural and synthetic sequence diversity. Over the past five years, her lab has developed methods that accelerate structural biology with applications to cryoEM, crystallography, protein design and computed 3D structures of thousands of proteins with unknown folds, protein complexes and RNA interactions, as well as flexible, dynamic and even disordered protein ensembles.

To address new challenges in protein design, Marks has adapted and developed NLP-inspired deep neural methods for (i) designing libraries of high affinity, specific nanobodies, antibodies that bypass the need for expensive rounds of selection or labor-intensive specificity assays and (ii) design and prediction of proteins that induce membranes compartmentalization and potentially biostasis in human cells and (iii) predicting the effect of genetic variation on disease and drug response.

In 2016, Marks received the ICSB Overton Award for outstanding accomplishment in the early-to-mid career with significant contribution to the field of computational biology, and in 2018 the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Ben Barres Early Career Acceleration Award in the Neurodegeneration Challenge.