Jens Meiler

Timeline

1. 1994–2001

   Chemistry and an NMR doctorate

   Born in Leipzig in 1974, he studies chemistry at Leipzig University from 1994 to 1998. He earns his doctorate at Goethe University Frankfurt in 2001 in Christian Griesinger's laboratory, developing computational methods for biomolecular NMR spectroscopy.

2. 2001–2005

   Building Rosetta with David Baker

   In 2001, he moves to Seattle as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington to work with David Baker on creating the protein modeling software Rosetta. He programs part of Rosetta and adapts its protein design algorithm to design enzymes, leaving Seattle in April 2005.

3. 2005–2011

   Professor at Vanderbilt

   He joins the faculty of Vanderbilt University in 2005 as an assistant professor of chemistry, pharmacology and biomedical informatics, and receives tenure as an associate professor in 2011. His lab fuses computational and experimental work to determine membrane protein structures, design new proteins and relate the chemical structure of drug-like molecules to their biological activity.

4. 2015–2020

   Humboldt awards and a Leipzig institute

   In December 2015, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation gives him a Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award to collaborate with Leipzig University colleagues on G-protein coupled receptors. Leipzig University announces an Alexander von Humboldt Professorship for him in December 2018, and the foundation presents it in May 2019. In January 2020, he becomes director of the newly founded Institute for Drug Discovery at Leipzig University.

5. 2021–2022

   AAAS fellow, BCL and AlphaFold2

   In 2021, he is elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for developing and sharing protein structure methods and for de novo protein design. In 2022, he coauthors an introduction to the BioChemical Library (BCL), an open-source toolkit that combines small-molecule cheminformatics with machine-learning QSAR models for computer-aided drug discovery. With Diego del Alamo, Davide Sala and Hassane Mchaourab, he also shows in eLife in 2022 that subsampling the input sequence alignments drives AlphaFold2 to model transporters and G-protein-coupled receptors in several conformations.

6. 2024

   An alphavirus vaccine project

   In August 2024, he speaks at Vanderbilt as Director for Applied AI and Big Data in Biomedical Research and a board member of ScaDS.AI, the national AI competence center at Leipzig University. In December 2024, he is named principal investigator of a Vanderbilt-led project, funded with up to $46 million by the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), that uses computational modeling, AI-driven predictions and structural biology to develop a vaccine against all alphaviruses.

7. 2025

   A DFG program on protein design

   In February 2025, a Leipzig University and ScaDS.AI team that he co-leads with Clara Schoeder publishes a Science Advances study on combining AI models such as ESM-2 and ProteinMPNN with biophysical modelling in the Rosetta software. In April 2025, the German Research Foundation (DFG) announces a priority program, “Artificial Intelligence for the Design of Functional Proteins”, which runs at ScaDS.AI Dresden/Leipzig from 2026 under his coordination.

8. Since October 2025

   Scientific director of ScaDS.AI

   Leipzig University founds the Data Science Center ScaDS.AI Leipzig in October 2025, and he becomes its scientific director while remaining Humboldt Professor and head of the Institute for Drug Discovery. He also secures about four million euros from the Free State of Saxony for a brain-inspired supercomputer, which starts operating at Leipzig University in October 2025 for uses that include AI-supported drug discovery. As of June 2026, he is a Distinguished Research Professor of chemistry, pharmacology and biomedical informatics at Vanderbilt University.