Cornell Center for Antimicrobial Resistance Research & Education Spring Seminar Series 2026

Title: Accelerating antibiotic discovery with AI

Speaker Bio: César de la Fuente is a Presidential Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he leads the Machine Biology Group. He is one of the youngest tenured professors in the history of Penn Medicine. He completed postdoctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and earned a PhD from the University of British Columbia (UBC). His research goal is to use the power of machines to accelerate discoveries in biology and medicine. Notably, he pioneered the development of the first computer-designed antibiotic with efficacy in animal models, demonstrating the application of AI for antibiotic discovery and helping launch this emerging field. His lab is at the forefront of developing computational methods to mine the world’s biological information digitally, leading to the identification of over a million new antimicrobial compounds. It is estimated that the work of de la Fuente and his collaborators has multiplied the speed of antibiotic discovery by a factor of several million, saving many years of human research and reducing what once took decades of collective work to just hours. De la Fuente has won more than 80 awards, including the Princess of Girona Prize, appeared as an invited speaker at nearly 400 talks, is a fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (one of the youngest ever inducted), a Sloan Fellow, is a National Academy of Medicine Emerging Leader, and has received an Honorary Doctorate from the University of León. He has published around 200 peer-reviewed papers in top-tier journals such as Cell, Science, Cell Host Microbe, Nature Biomedical Engineering, and PNAS.