Dr. Nazim Bouatta is a Senior Research Fellow in Systems Biology and Systems Pharmacology at Harvard Medical School, where he applies his expertise in machine learning, physics, and mathematics to solve complex biological problems such as understanding protein structures and predicting drug interactions. He co-supervised the development of OpenFold, an open-source, trainable, and optimized version of AlphaFold2. The release of OpenFold has led to significant developments, including the creation of the ESM Metagenomic Atlas by Meta AI, which contains over 600 million predicted protein structures. He has also led the development of a novel approach that uses machine learning to predict protein structure through a protein language model without explicit evolutionary information.
AlphaFold2 and OpenFold have the potential to transform our understanding of biological phenomena by addressing the combinatorial complexity of biology from molecules to cells to organisms. Inspired by the success of foundation models trained on diverse data that can perform a range of downstream tasks, Dr. Bouatta's vision is to develop a unified model that can generalize across different domains and scales of biology, turning biology into a predictive science. Furthermore, the generalization of AlphaFold2 and OpenFold can reveal general principles about the organization and behavior of biological phenomena at all scales, which experiments alone cannot fully characterize.
Dr. Bouatta is currently leading multiple research efforts that include co-folding proteins and ligands, understanding the effect of mutations on protein structures, and predicting RNA 3D structure. These projects, taken collectively, aim at building a unified model for biology.
Dr. Bouatta provided a series of special lectures at Harvard explaining the protein structure problem and the detailed workings of AlphaFold2. At Columbia, he taught a graduate lecture on geometric deep learning for molecular modeling.
Dr. Bouatta earned his doctoral degree in high-energy theoretical physics in the group of Prof. M. Henneaux and completed his postdoctoral training in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP) at Cambridge University. Then, he transitioned to systems biology at Harvard Medical School, where he received training in cellular and molecular biology in the lab of Prof. J. Lieberman before joining Prof. P. Sorger's group.
