Kelly Brock

I am a computational biologist with a particular passion for using and developing tools for identifying genetic and infectious contributors to human disease. My background is in using mathematical modeling, machine learning including deep learning, and other computational methods to better understand how proteins and RNA have evolved, how they fold, and how they interact in the larger context of the cell and the outside environment. I received my PhD in Computational and Systems Biology from MIT in 2016 (in Jeremy England's biophysics group), and I went on to do a joint postdoc with Debora Marks and Chris Sander at Harvard Medical School. In 2022, I became a senior computational biologist at Kernal Biologics, and in late 2024 I moved back into academia and joined the Institute for Experiential AI. A large part of my work over the past years has been to build collaborations across multiple labs and biological applications, including structural analysis for difficult to characterize protein and RNA targets, variant effect prediction for human disease, and modeling immune escape for SARS-CoV-2 variants.