Postdoctoral Fellow | Broad interests in Cell Wall, Soft matter, Biophysics, Mathematics, Philosophy, Evolution and History.
United States
Joined April 2012
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Om Prakash retweeted
Venki Ramakrishnan (Molecular biologist, Nobel Prize): "The experimental part [of drug discovery] is always going to be the bottleneck."
Recent headlines about using AI to speed up drug discovery made me curious about what that looks like and where it is today. So I flew to the UK to interview Venki Ramakrishnan who is on the scientific advisory board of Demis Hassabis' Isomorphic Labs.
He has described himself as a "failed physicist" starting originally with a physics PhD who changed fields because he felt his work was incremental. After pivoting into molecular biology without a degree he discovered the field of work that eventually led to his Nobel prize.
So aside from drug discovery, I also asked him about how AI is impacting the field of biology, how biology compares to physics, and the politics behind the Nobel prize.
Chapters:
00:00 Intro
00:43 How drugs are designed
04:54 Why drug testing remains difficult
07:02 How AI will impact the field of biology
10:35 Switching from physics to biology
15:00 How to choose research problems that matter
23:19 Did lacking a credential hurt his career
26:50 Physics vs biology
33:21 Why physicists succeed in other fields
35:10 The politics of the Nobel Prize
38:37 Top scientific book recommendations
40:05 Advice for young people
41:43 Outro
Where to watch:
• YouTube - youtube.com/watch?v=-1q0zA21…
• Spotify - open.spotify.com/episode/2M0…
• Apple Podcasts - podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas…
• Transcript - developing.dev/p/e074-venki-…
Thank you to the sponsor of this episode for supporting my work:
• WorkOS: makes your app Enterprise Ready with easy to use APIs to add SSO, SCIM, RBAC, and more in just a few lines of code, check them out at workos.com/
Om Prakash retweeted
Excited to share our new paper @NaturePhysics! 🎉
We show how motor-driven flows remodel DNA into a viscoelastic network that feeds back to transform chaotic motion into synchronized, millimeter-scale oscillations!
Read more here
doi.org/10.1038/s41567-026-0…
Om Prakash retweeted
I built Recall for the Meta Global AI Developer Hackathon: a voice-first memory of your home, built first for blind and low-vision people.
Walk through a room once, then ask "where's my watch?" and be walked there by voice.
A blindfolded run, one take: youtu.be/vRAR3FHNSks
Om Prakash retweeted
Most think vibecoding at scale is slop. Here’s a counterexample.
Today we release a 16M-line formalization of the entire Stacks Project, critical infra underlying modern math, with optimized code quality and its highly interconnected structure preserved.
A mathematical city 🌆
Om Prakash retweeted
Our vault paper is now up on biorxiv: biorxiv.org/content/10.64898…
Om Prakash retweeted
1/4 One DNA sequence, many chromatin states.
Excited to share SMFNet, a diffusion model predicting single-molecule chromatin accessibility. Explainer video below!
With co-first author Till (his thread: bsky.app/profile/tschwammle.…), Yuliya, Roze, @anshulkundaje & Arnaud Krebs.
Om Prakash retweeted
A new RNA foundation model, published in Nature.
Researchers introduce structRFM, an open, structure-guided RNA foundation model trained on 21 million RNA sequence–structure pairs.
Unlike conventional RNA language models that primarily learn from sequences, structRFM incorporates base-pairing information directly into pre-training, enabling joint learning of RNA sequence and structure.
Key highlights:
• Structure-guided pre-training: A new masked language modeling strategy (SGMLM) captures RNA base-pairing relationships.
• RNA structure prediction: Achieves state-of-the-art performance on secondary structure benchmarks.
• 3D RNA folding: Its Zfold adaptation delivers competitive performance with AlphaFold 3 across established RNA structure benchmarks.
• Broad generalization: Supports RNA structure prediction, splice-site prediction, IRES identification, and ncRNA classification.
The complete dataset, model weights, and source code are openly available.
From sequence-only learning to structure-aware foundation models, RNA AI is taking another step forward.
Nature paper: doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-1…
#RNA #AIforBiology #FoundationModels #Nature
🤖 Made with AI
Om Prakash retweeted
We’re sharing how our biology research team worked with Claude to map the first 3D structure of a vault particle from bacterial life.
Vault particles are a longstanding mystery. They are barrel-shaped objects, among the largest protein structures found in our cells. They were first discovered by Leonard Rome and Nancy Kedersha in 1986, but their function remains unknown.
With Claude, we’ve found results that might bring us closer to solving that mystery.
Until now, vaults were only known in the cells of complex things like animals and plants. We have shown that similar proteins from bacteria (and the viruses that infect them) can also assemble into vaults. Finding the structures in these simpler forms of life may make it easier to investigate their function in our own cells.
For our life sciences team, the project was also a demonstration of the potential (and the limitations) of using AI to accelerate science.
In our full piece, we discuss how Claude was able to dramatically speed up some stages—manually determining the vault particle’s structure would have taken weeks to months of painstaking work, but here it took days. We also discuss how Claude made some simple mistakes along the way, and how we collaborated with our machine learning researchers to address them.
Read more: anthropic.com/research/inves…
Om Prakash retweeted
Ed Witten and Claude form a formidable duo
A Note On Lattice Definition of Gauge Theories With Chiral Fermions
Edward Witten
arxiv.org/abs/2611.05051 [𝚑𝚎𝚙-𝚕𝚊𝚝]
ALT Because of the fermion doubling problem, it has been a longstanding challenge to describe a lattice algorithm for studying four-dimensional gauge theories coupled to chiral fermions. Recently, an algorithm to do so has been described by Craig, extending partial results in the previous literature. Here we describe a variant of this algorithm, based on interpolating a lattice gauge field over the continuum (as in Craig's work) and coupling the interpolated gauge field to continuum chiral fermions. The same variant was also proposed recently by Hsu. In any dimension and for any anomaly-free representation, this approach can be implemented on a computer in principle, but not in practice by Monte Carlo methods because the chiral fermion path integral is not positive.
Om Prakash retweeted
These 14 organic molecules from the Murchison meteorite were imaged at #CFNatBrookhaven.
They are among thousands of other carbon-based molecules uncovered from the meteorite, suggesting the chemical foundation for life is woven into the universe. bnl.gov/newsroom/news.php?a=…
Om Prakash retweeted
Announcing three major scientific discoveries, one each in mathematics (harmonic analysis), computer science (complexity theory), and physics (quantum field theory).
AI starting to help us improve our understanding of the universe! openai.com/index/building-sc…
Om Prakash retweeted
In developing embryos, cells move a lot! Plenty of that movement is random. Is random cell mixing a feature or bug for tissue patterning? Turns out it’s both! Excited to share the 1st preprint from my postdoc w/ @SeanMegason @SeanEMcGeary @KleinLabHMS 1/20 doi.org/10.1101/2025.03.01.6…
Om Prakash retweeted
💥 Some personal news 💥
#VisualAlgebra is finally DONE! I just sent off an 820-page pdf to the editor. Almost exactly 7 years after I started. The zip file that contains the 100+ plain text LaTeX files and nothing else is a whopping 5.4 MB.
Now onward to Volume 2!
Om Prakash retweeted
Read more from @carlzimmer in @NYTimes: nytimes.com/2026/10/20/scien…
How Omnii-1 designed the phage: radicalnumerics.ai/blog/omni…
Explore Omnii-1 and eight distinct applications, from cancer vaccines to biodefense radicalnumerics.ai/blog/omni…
Om Prakash retweeted
Introducing Omnii-1, our most powerful genome language model, and a major step toward general biological intelligence
In a world first, Omnii-1 designed the first AI-generated bacteriophages to be administered to a human patient with an antibiotic-resistant infection under compassionate use
Om Prakash retweeted
According to the laws of thermodynamics, information can be converted into energy. An information engine that harnesses environmental memory and exhibits non-Markovian dynamics has now been realized in experiments.
nature.com/articles/s41567-0…
Om Prakash retweeted
Ben Wilson (@BenWilsonTweets) has stage 4 cancer and 4 kids under the age of 5.
I want to help him as much as possible, so I invited him on the podcast to talk about his work studying history’s greatest leaders and what it’s like getting told he’s going to die at 38.
He’s a good guy, a close friend, and one of my favorite podcasters.
His work has benefited millions of people all across the world.
Please watch this episode and see if you can help with medicine, introductions, or donations.
0:00 What Ben has learned from making How to Take Over the World and studying history’s greatest leaders.
55:51 Living like you're dying. Ben on facing cancer.
Om Prakash retweeted
Towards organic quasicrystals!—Check out our new article in PNAS @PNASNews , a collaboration with Tom Runčevski @RuncevskiLab and his group at SMU, describing an unusual molecular architecture in which an asymmetric molecule assembles into pseudo-fivefold helices that further organize into an ice-ray pentagonal packing within a fully periodic bulk crystal. Peripheral disorder accommodates the geometric frustration inherent to pentagonal tessellation, enabling the stabilization of this remarkable architecture. The resulting hierarchical bonding gives rise to pronounced structural anisotropy, producing crystals with extreme aspect ratios and remarkable elastic flexibility. A step towards understanding how molecular systems can overcome geometric frustration and approach quasicrystal-like order within periodic crystals. @RINYUAD @NYUAbuDhabi @NYUAD_CSEM
Full article:
pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.26…
Om Prakash retweeted
Nature research paper: Experimental observation of critical topology
go.nature.com/4egA1jF
Om Prakash retweeted
🎇 Good news! 🎇 The kind people at @BBSJournal have made the new collection on "Conscious AI and biological naturalism" completely #OpenAccess for a limited period. This include the target article, all 50 commentaries (many of which disagree with me), and my response. Go to the link and click 'save pdf': DOI.org/10.1017/S0140525X250…
For easier ways into the debate, try my @NoemaMag essay on "The Mythology of Conscious AI" (winner of the 2025 @berggruenInst Essay Prize), and this 2026 main-stage @TEDTalks:
noemamag.com/the-mythology-o…
ted.com/talks/anil_seth_why_…
