César de la Fuente, PhD
University of Pennsylvania
YOUNG INVESTIGATOR AWARD
Biography
César de la Fuente is a Presidential Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he leads the Machine Biology Group. He completed postdoctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and earned a PhD from the University of British Columbia (UBC). His research goal is to use the power of machines to accelerate discoveries in biology and medicine. Specifically, he pioneered the development of the first computer-designed antibiotic with efficacy in animal models, demonstrating the application of AI for antibiotic discovery and helping launch this emerging field.
His lab has also been in the vanguard of developing computational methods to mine the world’s biological information, leading to the breakthrough discovery of a whole new world of antimicrobials. These efforts explored the human proteome as a source of antibiotics for the first time. De la Fuente’s group was also the first to find therapeutic molecules in extinct organisms, launching the field of molecular de-extinction.
De la Fuente has received over 70 national and international awards. Most recently, he was awarded the prestigious Princess of Girona Prize, the ASM Award for Early Career Applied and Biotechnological Research, the Rao Makineni Lectureship Award by the American Peptide Society, and was selected as a National Academy of Medicine Emerging Leader in Health and Medicine.
He has co-authored an influential book on machine learning for drug discovery and his scientific discoveries have yielded multiple patents and over 150 publications, including papers in Science, Cell, Cell Host Microbe, Nature Biomedical Engineering, Nature Communications, PNAS, ACS Nano, Nature Chemical Biology, and Advanced Materials.