Sirisha Rao

At Oak Ridge National Laboratory, I develop representation-learning and generative AI frameworks for protein engineering, drug discovery, and quantitative bioimaging. My work turns high-dimensional biological data into experimentally actionable priorities.

I built interpretable Cas9/Cas12 models that identified high-impact modification sites and reduced engineering search spaces by more than 95%. I also fine-tuned ProtGPT2 to generate structurally plausible Cas9 sequences and built protein–ligand affinity models using sequence, structure, and ligand embeddings.

I create scalable scientific ML workflows spanning virtual screening, molecular modeling, cryo-EM, AFM, and confocal imaging. My YOLO and U-Net pipelines enabled 100× faster population-scale phenotyping, while containerized infrastructure supports end-to-end analysis in network-restricted environments.