Team

Alicja Maksymiuk

PhD Student

Alicja (Ala) Maksymiuk is a DPhil student at the University of Oxford working on generative machine learning for drug discovery, with a focus on molecule generation. Her recent work introduces topological-guidance methods for steering diffusion-based generative models toward macrocyclic drug candidates (MacroGuide).

Co-supervised with: Michael Bronstein, İsmail İlkan Ceylan, Fernanda Duarte

Antonio Franca

PhD Student

Antonio focuses on diffusion model training strategies and efficient inference for scientific applications. His research covers scalable approximate inference and biologically realistic generative modeling.

Charlie B. Tan

PhD Student

Charlie works on amortized sampling and normalizing flows for scalable equilibrium inference in physics and chemistry domains. He has contributed to transfer learning and robust samplers for energy-based models.

Co-supervised with: Michael Bronstein

Fred Zhangzhi Peng

PhD Student

Fred Zhangzhi Peng is a third-year PhD student at Duke University, where he works with Anru Zhang on statistical machine learning and with Alexander Tong (AITHYRA) on generative models. His research focuses on diffusion and discrete generative models, with applications spanning language models and protein design.

Co-supervised with: Anru R. Zhang, Christian Dallago

Kacper Wyrwal

PhD Student

Kacper joins the group as a PhD student at the University of Oxford in fall 2026. He is co-supervised with Michael Bronstein and Alexander Tong, and is a recipient of the G-Research Graduate Scholarship. His research spans machine learning, including topological flow matching and Gaussian processes on manifolds.

Co-supervised with: Michael Bronstein, İsmail İlkan Ceylan

Katarina Petrović

PhD Student

Katarina works on flow-based generative models, including flow matching and diffusion, with a focus on dynamics in science—such as trajectory inference for single cells and non-gradient field dynamics (e.g. Curly Flow Matching).

Co-supervised with: Michael Bronstein, İsmail İlkan Ceylan

Maximilian Guidi

PhD Student

Max joins the group as a PhD student in September 2026. He holds a master's degree from the ETH Zurich Department of Mathematics, and has visited Debbie Marks' lab at Harvard and Bruno Correia's lab at EPFL.

Niklas Rindtorff

PhD Student

Niklas researches generative models and computational methods for biological imaging and molecular design. His work focuses on bridging deep learning with structural biology applications.

Raul Minan

PhD Student

Raul works on machine learning for structure-based drug discovery, with a focus on protein–ligand docking and generative modeling of protein conformations. His work includes geodesic-guided diffusion methods for molecular docking (GeoDirDock) and generative models for ligand-accommodating pocket conformations (Sesame).

Romeo Passaro

PhD Student

Romeo is a Predoctoral Fellow at Aithyra, working on geometric and physics-inspired machine learning for biomedical applications.

Co-supervised with: Michael Bronstein

Sebastian Bauer

Visiting Student

Sebastian joins the group as a visiting student in September 2026. He comes from Stockholm University and SciLifeLab, where he worked on machine learning for microscopy and graph neural networks. His research interests span machine learning, microscopy, and graph neural networks.

Primary supervisor: Juliette Griffie

Zander Blasingame

Postdoctoral Fellow

I am a postdoctoral fellow at Aithyra in Vienna, Austria working with Alex Tong where I study generative models for life sciences.

Alexander Tong

Principal Investigator

Alexander Tong is a Principal Investigator at Aithyra, a research institute at the intersection of machine learning and life sciences led by Michael Bronstein and funded by the Boehringer Ingelheim Foundation. He works on generative modeling, deep learning, and optimal transport, with applications to cell and molecular biology. He received his PhD from Yale University in 2021, advised by Smita Krishnaswamy, after which he was a postdoc at Mila with Yoshua Bengio and then an assistant professor at Duke University.