Stephen Z. Lu

Hey there, welcome to my blog! My name is Stephen and I am a final year undergraduate student in honours computer science at McGill University.

I am broadly interested in developing data-driven methods to model physical systems — with a focus on biomolecular (proteins & small molecules) structure, function, and dynamics.

More concretely, my current research directions include:

• Developing novel generative frameworks tailored to functional molecular optimization. (example)
• Leveraging multimodal contrastive learning to acquire robust and transferable latent representations for chemical perturbation datasets. (example)
• Efficiently producing high quality protein conformations using latent generative models of protein structure and sequence (example)

I have previously been:

• Research intern at:
  • BigHat Biosciences — working on conditional protein language models for antibody optimization
  • Mila — working on molecule generation with GFlowNets in Professor Yoshua Bengio’s lab
  • The Hospital for Sick Children — working on clinical screening models for upper respiratory and urinary tract infections
• Co-founding engineer at Hero AI — working on clinical automation software
• Selected as an 8VC Fellow
• Selected as a Schulich Scholar
• Silver medallist at the ‘19 Canada Wide Science Fair

In my free time, I love playing pickup basketball at my local park (Valois park in Pointe-Claire if you’re from the area), composing mostly funky (and a few serious) songs on the piano, discovering breathtaking landscapes nestled in low-profile hiking trails (my profile pic above was taken atop Mt. Wakakusa in Nara, Japan), and spending time with my family and friends in my hometown of Montreal, Quebec.

Feel free to reach out stephen.lu@mail.mcgill.ca if there is anything you want to discuss!