About me

Hi there! My name is Charlie and I am a PhD Student at the Cambridge Centre for AI in Medicine where I am supervised by Prof Sir Tom Blundell and Prof Pietro Lio. I have a background in Biochemsitry and a passion for AI technology to solve problems in structural biology and drug discovery, in particular with generative modelling and Geomtric Deep Learning.

I am also keen about fostering closer relationships between students and industry, science communication and advising student groups. You can listen to my guest appeareance on iGEM's Synthetic Biology Podcast here! Feel free to reach out to me for internships, advising and consulting opportunities at cch57 [at] cam.ac.uk.

Experience

AI Scientist Intern, BenvolentAI - 2021-2021

Work on self-supervised learning of protein structures with the Target ID team.

PhD Researcher, Cambridge Centre for AI in Medicine - 2021-Present

Research on AI/ML for strutural biology for drug design.

Education

PhD, Computer Science - 2021-2025

University of Cambridge - Cambridge Centre for AI in Medicine, funded by AstraZeneca and GSK

MSc Bioinformatics and Theoretical Systems Biology - 2020-2021

Imperial College London - Centre for Intergrative Systems Biology and Bioinformatics

BSc Biochemsitry - 2017-2020

Imperial College London - Department of Life Sciences

Publications

Benchmarking Generated Poses: How Rational is Structure-based Drug Design with Generative Models?. C. Harris, K. Didi, A. Jamasb, C. Joshi, S. Mathis, P. Lio, T. Blundell. Under review.

DiffHopp: A Graph Diffusion Model for Novel Drug Design via Scaffold Hopping. J. Torge, C. Harris, S. Mathis, P. Lio. Spotlight - ICML WCB 2023.

Multi-State RNA Design with Geometric Multi-Graph Neural Network. C. Joshi, A. Jasamb, R. Vinas C. Harris, S. Mathis, P. Lio ICML WCB 2023.

Flexible Small-Molecule Design and Optimization with Equivariant Diffusion Models.Charles Harris, K. Didi, A. Schneuing, Y. Du, A. Jamasb, M. Bronstein, B. Correia, P. Lio, T. Blundell. ICLR MLDD 2023.

Structure-based Drug Design with Equivariant Diffusion Models. Arne Schneuing, Yuanqi Du, Charles Harris, Arian Jamasb, Ilia Igashov, Weitao Du, Tom Blundell, Pietro Lió, Carla Gomes, Max Welling, Michael Bronstein, Bruno Correia. NeurIPS 2022 Machine Learning for Structural Biology Workshop, Under review at ICLR 2023. Link.

Graphein - a Python Library for Geometric Deep Learning and Network Analysis on Biomolecular Structures and Interaction Networks. Arian Rokkum Jamasb, Ramon Viñas Torné, Eric J Ma, Yuanqi Du, Charles Harris, Kexin Huang, Dominic Hall, Pietro Lio, Tom Leon Blundell. NeurIPS 2022 and ICML 2022 AI for Science Workshop. Link

Projects

Graphein

I am currently contributing to the open source package Graphein whilst aims to democratise access to biological data to use in Geometric Deep Learning. Most of my work focuses on the protein graph submodule.



1st Imperial College AI in Drug Discovery Conference

Organised and chaired the first ever student-led conference dedicated to just AI in Drug Discovery. I also had the honour to moderate 2 panel discussions. One focusing on the business aspects of running and AI in DD startups with the CEOs of LabGenius, Biorelate, GlamourousAI and OneThree Biotech. The second was a science panel with Prof Sir Tom Blundell, Prof Michael Bronstein and Dr Andreas Bender.



Imperial College Computational Biology Society

I founded and chaired the Imperial College Computational Biology Society for 2 year. The Society is a student-led group for those intereted in the intersection of biology and technology. In addition to the conference, we also organised regular webinars (DeepMind, BenevolentAI, Nvidia) and workshops to teach Life Scientists how to code.



Communication

I am a passionate believer in the importance of science communication and actively looking for opportunities to improve my skills. Please feel free to reach out to me if you would like a speaker with my background to appear on you outlet. Please see below for an example of my previous work.

Guest Appeareance - iGEM Synthetic Biology Podcast

In this episode, I try to explain how AlphaFold2 works to a general audience with only a biological background. I also discuss future areas in structural biology that DeepMind could be working on and generally what this breakthrought means for biological research.







Other

Advisory Positions

Imperial Internation Directed Evolution Competition (iDEC) Team

Awards

Gold - International Chemistry Olympiad 2017 UK Round One

David Lean Scholar - Leighton Park School

Prefect - Leighton Park School

Extra Qualifications

Royal Areo Club certified solo glider pilot
GCSE Mandarin (A)

Volunterring

Ambassador - Helen Arkell Dyslexia Charity