Seminar Title: "The language of proteins (and cells)"
When
Sept. 8, 2026, 3:30 – 4:45 p.m.
Where
ENR2, Room S107
Presenter Details
Claire McWhite, Assistant Professor, MCB, UArizona
Seminar Information
My lab develops approaches for making biological foundation models more interpretable and useful for discovery. I will focus on Concept Activation Vectors (CAVs), which represent biological concepts as simple directions in embedding space and can be used to identify protein functions, molecular specificities, and cell states. I will also discuss complementary work on measuring functional similarity from protein representations and new statistics to discover higher-order interactions.
Seminar Host
Pascale Charest, MCB
Contacts
Whitney DeGroot