Martina Occhetta
PhD student @ Queen Mary University of London and Exscientia
Welcome! I am a first-year PhD student in the AI for Drug Discovery CTP at Queen Mary University of London, working in partnership with Exscientia. My research, supervised by Prof. Conrad Bessant and Dr. Mani Mudaliar, explores machine learning methods for biological significance-based drug target identification.
I graduated from the University of Cambridge in 2023 with an MPhil in Computational Biology, where I completed my master’s thesis under Prof. Michele Vendruscolo. My work focused on AlphaFold2-based prediction of the co-condensation propensity of proteins. Prior to that, I earned a BSc in Biochemistry from Imperial College London. I completed my undergraduate thesis under the supervision of Dr. Robert Weinzierl, focusing on molecular dynamic trajectory classification to identify subclasses of structurally similar conformational ensembles.
My interests lie at the intersection between biology, chemistry, and machine learning, with a focus on understanding the behaviour of biological systems at different scales.
Originally from Milan, Italy, I moved to the UK when I was 18. While I definitely miss the food, the UK has been home long enough that I think I’ll stick around – even if the pasta just isn’t the same!