Zhangzhi Peng

About Me

I’m Zhangzhi Peng (彭张智), a BME Ph.D. student at Chatterjee Lab, Duke University, trained as a computer scientist. Preferred to be called Zhangzhi, Fred, or “Hey dude”. I’m broadly interested in machine learning and protein design. Questions I’m thinking about:

• Bridging the Gap Between Representation Learning and Generative Modeling:
  • “What I cannot create, I do not understand.” This quote by Richard Feynman encapsulates that Representation Learning and Generative Modeling are the two sides of the same coin. But how exactly do we transform one into the other?
• How to design binders to a target from sequence alone?
  • Structure-based protein design has been the star of the show. But what about sequence-based design? Sequences encode the complete blueprint of a protein and thus, in theory, should be on par with their structure-based counterparts. Yet, the chasm is vast. How to fill in the gap?
• The third dimension of protein language models(pLMs).
  • pLMs is reaching a plateau, with model sizes and training corpora stretching their limits. What lies beyond? A more efficient architecture or a deeper integration of biological context.

Publications

Misc

• I maintain my CV of Failure, which many find to be encouraging.