Dan Liu

Dan Liu is a postdoctoral fellow in the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Her research uses AI to understand and engineer biomolecular interactions. Dan develops foundation models that predict protein-protein interactions and characterize how mutations affect these interactions. During her doctoral studies, she created PLM-interact, a pioneering protein language model framework that jointly encodes protein pairs to predict interactions and mutation effects, advancing the study of virus-host biology and establishing new approaches for sequence- based interaction modeling. She also developed EvoMIL, a multiple-instance learning framework that identifies viral proteins driving host specificity, providing novel insights into virus-host associations. As an MIT-Novo Nordisk Artificial Intelligence Postdoctoral Fellow, Dan will build multimodal AI models that integrate protein sequences, structures, and biological context to improve interaction prediction and enable the design of mutation-robust protein binders. Her work could accelerate the development of durable therapeutics against rapidly evolving pathogens.