Amelia Villegas Morcillo

My research interests lie in developing AI methods to understand the natural world, with specific applications in biology and healthcare.

Currently, I am a Postdoctoral Researcher at Delft University of Technology, as part of the Delft Bioinformatics Lab. I am working on generative modeling for drug discovery, with a particular emphasis on guiding diffusion models to design antibodies with specific properties that makes them more suitable for therapeutics. Additionally, two critical challenges I am working towards is the modeling of non-canonical amino acids and developing a unified representation space for interactions between proteins and small molecules. For these goals, I am exploring all-atom (as opposed to amino acid) representations for proteins within discrete diffusion frameworks.

From an application perspective, one of my guiding motivations is advancing our understanding and treatment of autoimmune diseases. In collaboration with domain and clinical experts, I am working on optimizing antibody binding affinity for specific autoimmune disease targets, as well as identifying epitopes in autoreactive antigens to gain deeper insights into disease responses.

Previously, I completed my PhD at University of Granada. During my thesis, I worked on protein prediction tasks including protein structure and function prediction using representation learning techniques.