Robert Verkuil

Robert Verkuil is a research engineer at Biohub whose main focus is molecular design, after earlier work on protein language models at FAIR and EvolutionaryScale. In 2021, they coauthored MSA Transformer, and in 2022 their inverse-folding paper received an Outstanding Paper Runner Up award at ICML. They are also an author of the Science papers on ESMFold in 2023 and ESM3 in 2025. In June 2026, they were among the speakers at a Biohub webinar on binder design with ESMFold2.

Now at: Biohub

Timeline

2021

MSA Transformer

They are among the authors of MSA Transformer, a protein language model published in the Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Machine Learning in 2021, with Roshan Rao, Jason Liu, Joshua Meier, John Canny, Pieter Abbeel, Tom Sercu and Alexander Rives. The model comes from the Meta Fundamental AI Research Protein Team.
2022

Inverse folding at ICML

The paper "Learning inverse folding from millions of predicted structures", on which they are the second author, is named an Outstanding Paper Runner Up at ICML 2022. It uses AlphaFold2 to predict structures for 12 million protein sequences and trains a sequence-to-sequence transformer that reaches 51% native sequence recovery on structurally held-out backbones. The ESM-IF1 model is released in April 2022.
December 2022

A protein design preprint

The Meta Fundamental AI Research Protein Team releases two protein design preprints in December 2022, including "Language models generalize beyond natural proteins" by Verkuil, Kabeli and colleagues.
2023

ESMFold paper in Science

Science publishes "Evolutionary-scale prediction of atomic-level protein structure with a language model" in 2023, with them among the authors alongside Zeming Lin, Halil Akin, Roshan Rao and others. The paper is the citation for ESM-2, ESMFold and the ESM Atlas.
2025

ESM3 in Science

The 2025 Science paper "Simulating 500 million years of evolution with a language model", which introduces ESM3 from the EvolutionaryScale team, lists them among its authors with Thomas Hayes, Roshan Rao and Alexander Rives.
June 2026

Binder design with ESMFold2

They are among the speakers at Biohub's June 2026 webinar "Binder Design with ESMFold2". The preprint behind it designs and experimentally validates minibinders and antibodies against five targets, including EGFR, PD-L1 and CTLA-4.
As of October 2026

Research engineer at Biohub

They are a research engineer at Biohub, where their main focus is molecular design; they come from EvolutionaryScale and, before that, FAIR. In 2026, they are among the authors of the preprint "Language Modeling Materializes a World Model of Protein Biology".