Ben Orr, PhD

AI & Computational Biology Lead

Kortemme Lab (2021-2025). Keiser Lab; NSF Fellow (2021-2024). Ben graduated from Tufts in 2018 with a B.S. in Biochemistry and minor in Studio Art. As an undergraduate, he worked in Joshua Kritzer’s lab, designing cyclic peptide inhibitors of protein-protein interactions. He then worked as a Research Assistant in Jue Chen’s lab at Rockefeller U., studying membrane transporter proteins. He was in the Biophysics PhD program and was interested in improving de novo protein design protocols with machine learning techniques. He was co-mentored with Tanja Kortemme.

Lab papers

1. An improved model for prediction of de novo designed proteins with diverse geometries.

   Orr B, Crilly SE, Akpinaroglu D, Zhu E, Keiser MJ, Kortemme T. bioRxiv. 2025 Jun 06.