Team
Everything on this page relates to the Duke University group. Chris also leads an applied research team at NVIDIA; the two are separate, and the distinction matters if you are thinking of applying.
Principal investigator
Christian Dallago
Senior Research Scientist and Applied Research Team Lead, Digital Biology, NVIDIA.
Visiting Assistant Professor in Biostatistics & Bioinformatics, and Cell Biology, Duke University.
Chris earned his PhD in Informatics (summa cum laude) from the Technical University of Munich in 2023. During his doctoral studies he made advances in bio-sequence representation learning, helping to establish the field — particularly through early work on transformer models for proteins and nucleotides. His research also covered a range of applied bioinformatics problems, producing software and data that enabled new scientific work. He played a key role in launching rigorous evaluation standards for protein models in design and engineering, introducing benchmarking datasets and data-splitting analyses.
In his first two years at NVIDIA, Chris helped shape the company's digital biology strategy, contributing to product development, ecosystem building, and leadership initiatives. That work drove the release of open-source software addressing problems from accelerated homology search to biological design.
Since 2025 he has held a dual appointment: Visiting Assistant Professor at Duke University, and leader of an applied research group in Digital Biology at NVIDIA. At Duke he focuses on exploratory research in biological machine learning; at NVIDIA he leads applied research in accelerated drug discovery.
Service
- Member, Board of Directors, International Society for Computational Biology (2026–2029)
- Co-chair, ISCB Industry Advisory Council (2025–present)
- Co-editor, Machine Learning for Protein Science and Engineering, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press
- Main organiser, Machine Learning for Life and Material Sciences workshop, ICML 2024
- Area chair, Machine Learning in Biology, International Supercomputing 2022
- Reviewer for Nature Biotechnology, Nature Machine Intelligence, Nature Communications, Bioinformatics, PLoS Computational Biology, and IEEE/ACM TCBB
Elsewhere
Current members
- Fred Zhangzhi Peng
- Graduate student. Co-advised with Anru Zhang and Alex Tong.
- Matias Vantilburg
- Undergraduate researcher.
Collaborators
The collaboration network is a real part of how this lab works — several of the projects on the research page exist only because of it.
- Martin Steinegger
- Seoul National University.
- Milot Mirdita
- Sungkyunkwan University School of Medicine.
- Michael Heinzinger
- Helmholtz Munich.
- Rohit Singh
- Duke University.
Alumni
- Jason Guan
- Undergraduate researcher, 2026. Now: graduate student.
- Tom Pan
- Rotating graduate student, 2025. Now: Rohit Singh lab.
- Manuela Jaramillo
- Undergraduate researcher, 2025. Now: medical school.
On the NVIDIA relationship
All information on this page relates to the Duke University group led by Chris. For information about NVIDIA opportunities, please check the NVIDIA careers page. Work carried out at Duke is independent of NVIDIA, and working for the Duke group does not guarantee employment at, or access to, NVIDIA resources.