🧬 Breaking the Protein Code: Ken Dill and the Laufer Center Receive $1.38M DARPA Award!

Dill Lab team

The Laufer Center for Physical and Quantitative Biology at Stony Brook University has been awarded a one-year, $1,387,208 grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) under the NODES (Network of Optimal Dynamic Energy Signals) program (DARPA-PS-25-30-NODES-PA-058) for a project titled "Predicting Function from Sequence using a Database of All Atom Pathways and a Common Statistical Mechanics Language."

Principal Investigator Ken Dill and his team, including Laufer Center postdocs Anthony Bogetti and Ying-Jen Yang, along with MIT Broad Institute subcontractor Mrinal Shekhar, will develop a comprehensive computational framework to predict protein function directly from amino acid sequences by creating a database of atomic-level protein dynamics and establishing a universal statistical mechanics language for protein behavior. The project will generate ground-truth molecular dynamics trajectories for over 1,000 experimentally-validated protein conformational transitions using novel reinforcement learning-enhanced sampling methods, then train a large-scale AI model to learn the relationship between protein sequences and their dynamic pathways, ultimately bridging the critical gap between protein sequence and function to provide actionable insights for drug discovery, protein design, and understanding disease-related protein dysfunction.

What is DARPA?

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Young Faculty Award (YFA) program aims to identify and engage rising stars in junior research positions in academia and equivalent positions at non-profit research institutions, particularly those without prior DARPA funding, to expose them to Department of Defense (DoD) needs and DARPA’s mission to create and prevent technological surprise for national security. The YFA program will provide high-impact funding to researchers early in their careers to develop innovative new research that enables transformative DoD capabilities. Ultimately, the YFA program is developing the next generation of researchers focused on national security issues.