First Session

Dr. Martin Steinegger

Dr. Steinegger is an Assistant Professor at Seoul National University, associated with the Department of Biology, Institute of Molecular Biology and Genetics, Artificial Intelligence Institute, and the Bioinformatics Graduate School. His research group is developing algorithms and machine learning methods to analyze large-scale genomic and proteomic sequence data. His group has made notable contributions in the field of bioinformatics through the development of methods for sequence clustering (Linclust), metagenome assembly (Plass), homology searching (MMseqs2), protein structure prediction (AlphaFold2/ColabFold) and protein structure search (Foldseek). These software packages enjoy worldwide use and have been installed hundreds of thousands of times.
Dr. Steinegger studied bioinformatics and computer science at the Technical University Munich and Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. During this period, he worked closely with Professor Burkhard Rost, focusing on developing methods to predict protein mutation effects. He earned his Ph.D. from the Technical University Munich, under the guidance of Dr. Johannes Söding at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry. His Ph.D. research involved computational assembly, clustering, and annotation of metagenomic sequencing data. As a postdoctoral scholar at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine under the supervision of Professor Steven L. Salzberg, he developed methods for identifying pathogenic agents in infectious diseases, detecting assembly contamination in public datasets, and annotating missing exons in the human proteome.
As a prominent figure in the field of large-scale sequence data analysis and computational method development, Dr. Steinegger is a strong advocate for open science and open source.