Team

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.

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 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

Danyal Rehman

Visiting Researcher

Danyal is a Banting Postdoctoral Researcher at Mila – Québec AI Institute (advised by Yoshua Bengio) and a visiting researcher with the group, developing diffusion-, flow-, and autoregressive generative models for AI for science. He completed his PhD at MIT, with recent work on Boltzmann generators for molecular sampling (RegFlow, FALCON, Autoregressive Boltzmann Generators).

Primary supervisor: Yoshua Bengio

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

Han Tang

Visiting PhD Student

Han is a PhD candidate at the University of Copenhagen advised by Wouter Boomsma, visiting the Tong Group at Aithyra. His research sits at the intersection of machine learning, chemistry, and the life sciences. Before starting his PhD he was a Research Engineer at Tsinghua University's Institute for AI Industry Research (AIR).

Primary supervisor: Wouter Boomsma

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 Ceylan

Luka Mucko

Visiting Student

Luka is a scientific machine learning researcher and visiting student with the group, working on generative models for biological systems and AI for medical sciences. He holds a BSc and MSc in Computing/Data Science from the University of Zagreb, with interests in sampling, measure transport, diffusion, and flow-based models applied to chemistry and biology.

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

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.