Debbie Marks

Debbie Marks is a computational biologist leading the interdisciplinary Marks lab, which focuses on developing rigorous computational methods to address critical challenges in biomedical research. Her work centers on interpreting genetic variation and its implications for biological principles, disease mechanisms, and therapeutic discovery.

• Key research areas include evolutionary couplings in protein sequences, genome-wide mutation analysis, and synthetic protein design.
• The lab pioneered algorithmic approaches from statistical physics and graphical modeling to predict protein 3D structures from sequences alone, including transmembrane proteins previously resistant to experimental validation.
• Current projects involve analyzing protein conformational plasticity, pharmacological consequences of genetic mutations, and integrating multi-omics data to study drug effects in cancer contexts.