Ben Meinen
Head, Protein Design & Investigator AI Proteins
Ben Meinen conducted his Ph.D. research in protein folding and chaperone mechanism function characterization with Dr. James Bardwell at the University of Michigan. He transitioned into computational de novo protein design for a Post Doc with Dr. Chris Bahl at the Institute of Protein Innovation (IPI) in Boston. Following their work at the IPI, they formed AI Proteins, where Ben now leads the Protein Design Team.
Seminars
Wednesday 11th November 2026
Designing Miniprotein Medicine: Efficient, Constraint-Aware Pipelines for De Novo Miniprotein Design
1:45 pm
- De novo design models, trained on natural protein distributions, exhibit recurring failure modes such as poor designability when applied unconstrained to miniproteins
- We introduce a constraint-aware pipeline that filters and steers generation to mitigate these failure modes while preserving sequence diversity and designability
