Dr. Michael Heinzinger

Dr. Michael Heinzinger studied bioinformatics at the Technical University of Munich and Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. He completed his doctoral research with Prof. Burkhard Rost, where he pioneered the use of language models for protein sequences, advancing representation learning in this domain. He then worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the Rost Lab on multimodal protein language models and as a machine learning researcher at Sanofi, focusing on nanobody optimization. Since March 2025, he leads a tenure-track research group at the Institute of Computational Biology (ICB) at Helmholtz Munich.

Dr. Michael Heinzinger's research lies at the intersection of deep learning and computational biology, aiming to illuminate the "dark matter" of the protein universe and enable the design and optimization of proteins. His work develops foundation models that leverage rapidly growing biological data across sequence, structure, and function, with a focus on multimodal representation learning and evolution-guided strategies for improving natural proteins.