Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
Research Website | Google Scholar
César de la Fuente is a Presidential Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania and Director of the Machine Biology Group. He is widely recognized for pioneering AI approaches to antibiotic discovery and peptide design, dramatically accelerating the identification of preclinical candidates from years to hours. These candidates hold promise as therapies for infections that are currently untreatable. His work has reimagined the code of life as an information source that can be mined with algorithms to discover and design new functional biomolecules with therapeutic potential.
De la Fuente is among the youngest tenured professors in the history of Penn Medicine. He has received more than 80 major honors, including the Princess of Girona Prize and the Fleming Prize; was elected a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering as one of its youngest inductees; is an elected member of Academia Europaea; and received an Honorary Doctorate at age 39. He has published more than 200 peer-reviewed papers, including in Science, Cell, Nature Biomedical Engineering, Nature Microbiology, Nature Communications, and PNAS. He also holds multiple patents, has co-founded companies, and has licensed technologies emerging from his research.
Dr. de la Fuente’s lab’s mission is to use the power of machines to accelerate discovery in biology and medicine. They work at the interface of computation, engineering, chemistry, and biology to develop AI platforms that discover, design, and optimize biomolecules with therapeutic potential. Their research focuses particularly on antibiotic discovery, peptide design, synthetic biology, host defense, and the systematic mining of biological sequence space. Dr. de la Fuente pioneered the development of the first computer-designed antibiotic with efficacy in relevant animal infection models, demonstrating that machines can be used to design therapeutic molecules. His lab has also developed computational methods to mine the world’s biological information, leading to the identification of more than one million antimicrobial candidates and substantially accelerating the path from biological data to preclinical discovery.
More recently, Dr. de la Fuente’s lab used machine learning to identify therapeutic molecules in extinct organisms, helping launch the field of molecular de-extinction and yielding new preclinical antibiotic candidates. Dr. de la Fuente also introduced the concepts of “encrypted immunity” and, more broadly, “encrypted biology” to describe functional biomolecules hidden within biological systems and not previously recognized as active molecular actors. Collectively, their work integrates AI, molecular engineering, microbiology, and translational science to create new therapeutic and diagnostic technologies. These efforts have led to more than 200 publications in journals including Science, Cell, Cell Host & Microbe, Nature Biomedical Engineering, Nature Microbiology, Nature Chemical Biology, Nature Communications, and PNAS.
Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology; Cellular and Biomolecular Engineering; Machine Biology; AI-Enabled Biomolecular Engineering; Computational Antibiotic Discovery; Synthetic Biology; Antibiotics AI; Peptide Design; Peptides
Ph.D.: University of British Columbia (2014)
2026 Elected Member, Academia Europaea / The Academy of Europe 2026 Nature Research Advisory Council 2026 Fellow, Royal Society of Biology 2026 Honorary Doctorate, University of Leon 2026 Life Science Seminar 2025 Rafael Hervada Award for Biomedical Research 2025 Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher 2025 Falling Walls Finalist, Science Breakthroughs of the Year, Engineering & Technology 2025 Sloan Fellow 2025 World Economic Forum Young Global Leader 2025 EMBS Distinguished Lecturer 2024 Michael S. Brown New Investigator Research Award 2024 Fleming Prize 2024 ASM Award for Early Career Basic Research 2024 Selected as a Member of the Global Young Academy 2023 Invited to the Scientific Advisory Board of Keystone Symposia 2023 Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher 2023 Keystone Symposia Fellow 2023 Joseph Priestley Society Lecture 2023 Fellow, American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) 2023 Rao Makineni Lectureship Award 2023 Forbes 23 Spanish Change Makers 2022 Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher 2022 Molecules Young Investigator Award 2022 Young Investigator Award, Royal Spanish Society of Chemistry 2022 IJMS Young Investigator Award 2021 Forbes Top 100 Most Creative Spanish Individuals 2021 Forbes Top 50 Awarded Spanish Individuals 2021 ASM Award for Early Career Applied and Biotechnological Research 2021 Antibiotics Young Investigator Award 2021 EMBS Academic Early Career Achievement Award 2021 Thermo Fisher Award 2021 IADR Innovation in Oral Care Awards 2021 Princess of Girona Prize 2021 Waksman Foundation Lecturer 2021 ASM Distinguished Lecturer 2021 Philadelphia Business Journal 40 Under 40 2021 BMES CMBE Rising Star Award 2020 Brain & Behavior Research Foundation (BBRF) Young Investigator Award 2020 NIH MIRA investigator 2020 Chair, World Laureates Forum Computational Biology Summit Panel 2020 Invited to World Laureates Forum 2020 Selected by the U.S. National Academies to serve on the committee examining the long-term health and economic effects of antimicrobial resistance in the United States 2020 AIChE 35 Under 35 Award 2020 ACS Infectious Diseases Young Investigator Award 2020 30 Rising Leaders in the Life Sciences 2020 ACS Kavli Emerging Leader in Chemistry Lecture Award 2020 Scialog Fellow, Research Corporation for Science Advancement, the Paul G. Allen Frontiers Group, and the Frederick Gardner Cottrell Foundation 2019 Langer Prize, Inaugural Recipient 2019 Delegate. American Academy of Achievement. 53rd International Achievement Summit 2019 Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers Young Investigator Award 2019 Named one of the “World’s Top Innovators Under 35” by MIT Technology Review 2019 Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News Top 10 Under 40 2019 Presidential Professorship Chair, University of Pennsylvania 2018 Named a Wunderkind by STAT News 2017 ACS Nano Junior Fellow 2016 MIT Technology Review Innovator “Under 35”, Spain 2016 30 Under 30 Latino Boston
