!!Cesar de la Fuente - Biography
\\
De la Fuente directs the Machine Biology Group at the University of Pennsylvania and is one of the youngest tenured professors in the history of Penn Medicine. He completed postdoctoral research at MIT and earned a PhD from UBC. His research uses the power of machines to accelerate discovery in biology and medicine. He pioneered the development of the first computer-designed antibiotic with efficacy in animal models, helping establish AI-driven antibiotic discovery as an emerging field. His lab develops computational methods to mine the world’s biological information, enabling the identification of more than one million antimicrobial compounds and reframing the human body itself as a rich, systematic source of antibiotics. His group also launched the field of molecular de-extinction by identifying therapeutic molecules in extinct organisms, yielding preclinical antibiotic candidates. Beyond eukaryotes, his lab has expanded antibiotic discovery across other branches of the tree of life. Collectively, these initiatives have compressed the time required to identify preclinical candidates from years to hours, —saving years of human research and transforming what once demanded decades of collective effort into workflows that can be executed within hours. He is an elected Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, becoming one of the youngest ever inducted, and was recognized by MIT Technology Review as one of the world’s top innovators. His honors also include the inaugural Langer Prize, ACS Kavli Emerging Leader in Chemistry recognition, ASM Distinguished Lecturer, Waksman Foundation Lecturer, the Miklós Bodanszky Award, AIChE’s 35 Under 35 Award, the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers Young Investigator Award, the ACS Infectious Diseases Young Investigator Award, the Thermo Fisher Award, and the EMBS Academic Early Career Achievement Award. More recently, he has received the Princess of Girona Prize, the ASM Awards for Early Career Applied and Biotechnological Research and for Early Career Basic Research, the Rao Makineni Lectureship Award, and the Fleming Prize, and was selected as a National Academy of Medicine Emerging Leader in Health and Medicine. He has been named a Sloan Fellow and selected by the World Economic Forum to the Young Global Leaders Class of 2025. In 2026, de la Fuente was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology. He has been named a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher (top 1% most cited in the world) multiple times and received an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Leon at age 39. De la Fuente has delivered around 400 invited lectures, including many keynote and named lectures, and has also spoken at TEDx. He has co-authored an influential book on machine learning for drug discovery, secured multiple patents, and published around 200 peer-reviewed papers in journals including Cell, Science, Cell Host & Microbe, Nature Biomedical Engineering, and Nature Microbiology.\\ \\[{ALLOW view All}][{ALLOW edit cdelafuente}][{ALLOW upload cdelafuente}][{ALLOW comment All}]