news

2026

Aug	Ellen receives the K.H. Kuo Award for Outstanding Young Scientist in Structural Biology.
Jul	Ellen, Jeff, and Marc Aurèle Gilles teach a workshop on cryo-EM reconstruction at the ICCP Summer School.
Jun	CryoHype is presented at CVPR 2026! Ziyu and Ellen attend ChemAI NYC. Ryan, Robert, and Rish attend the 3D-EM Gordon Research Conference in Barcelona, Spain, and Rish receives a presentation award at the GRS.
May	Congratulations to Rish, Alkin, Ziyu, and Robert, who all passed their generals exams this spring! Congratulations to Keith for graduating with Highest Honors! Keith is elected to Tau Beta Pi and Sigma Xi, and receives the Computer Science Service Award and the Sigma Xi Book Award. Joseph Clark and Ariana-Dalia Vlad join the group. Welcome! Ellen gives a talk at the 90th Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Symposium on AI in Biology.
Apr	Ellen gives a talk at the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center Symposium on Biomedical Science and AI at the Broad Institute, in Cambridge, MA.
Mar	Joseph Clark starts rotating in the group, welcome! Ellen gives a Simons Foundation Presidential Lecture, “Algorithms for Biomolecular Structure Determination at the Proteome Scale,” as part of the foundation’s “Folding the Future: The Structural Biology Revolution” series. CryoHype is accepted to CVPR 2026!
Feb	Robert and Ryan visit the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub RWS, presenting the lab’s work on neural methods for ab initio reconstruction and data curation in cryo-ET. Ellen gives talks at the Biophysical Society Annual Meeting in San Francisco, CA, and at the Winter qBio Conference in Lahaina, HI.
Jan	New Year’s potluck! Ellen talks to Y Combinator about “The Future of AI Molecular Discovery”.

2025

Dec	Maxwell Soh starts rotating in the group, welcome! Ellen gives a talk at the cryo-EM symposium at Pacifichem 2025, in Honolulu, HI. E.Z. Lab visits San Diego, CA to present the lab’s work at NeurIPS 2025! Jeff and Minkyu gives a talk at the Machine Learning for Structural Biology (MLSB) workshop, and Ellen gives talks at both MLSB and Frontiers of Probabilistic Inference (FPI) workshops!
Nov	Ellen is named to be an AI2050 Early Career Fellow by Schmidt Sciences! 2025 Community-Wide Assessment of Cryo-EM Heterogeneous Reconstruction Algorithms (CAHRA) is launched! E.Z. Lab visits Cambridge, MA to present the lab’s work at the Molecular Machine Learning (MoML) Conference. Rish gives a talk as a Top 5 paper author.
Oct	Ellen wins the NIH New Innovator Award! E.Z. Lab visits Long Branch, NJ to present the lab’s work at the Princeton ImageX Labs (PIXL) Retreat. Ellen gives a talk at the NYC Integrative Structural Biology symposium.
Sep	Ariana Vlad starts rotating in the group, welcome! CryoBoltz and ChefNMR are accepted to NeurIPS 2025! Celebrating the start of the 2025-26 academic year. Robert presents his work at the Omenn-Darling Bioengineering Institute (ODBI) Retreat. Rish presents his work at the ODBI BioE Lunch and Learn series.
Aug	Ryan and Robert visits the Chan Zuckerberg Imaging Institute.
Jul	Jeffrey Gu joins the group as a postdoctoral research associate, after completing his Ph.D. at Stanford. Welcome! E.Z. Lab visits NYC to attend the 2025 Flatiron Institute Computational Cryo-EM Workshop.
Jun	Ryan gives a talk at the Cryo-EM Workshop 2025: “I have my data set — Now what?” hosted by the University of Michigan Life Sciences Institute, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Ellen attends the 3D-EM Gordon Research Seminar, in Newry, Maine. Our preprint describing CryoBoltz, for guided building of atomic models into heterogeneous cryo-EM maps, is posted! Check out our tweet thread here. CryoDRGN-AI is published in Nature Methods! Check out our tweet thread here.
May	Ryan gives a talk at the 3rd CryoNET course on advanced single particle cryoEM analysis in Copenhagen, Denmark. Ellen gives talks at the SBGrid Webinar Series, and at the Biannual Cambridge cryoEM consortium meeting. Our group presents our work at the Princeton Catalysis Initiative Symposium.
Apr	Rish gives a talk at the CryoET Object Identification Workshop hosted by the Chan Zuckerberg Imaging Institute, in Redwood City, California. Robert finishes his rotations and joins the group as a PhD student, welcome back!
Mar	Rish gives a talk at OpenEye’s CUP meeting in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Ellen and Rish visit the Broad Institute to give a talk at the Models, Inference, and Algorithms seminar.
Feb	Rish visits EMBL Heidelberg, Germany to give a talk in EMBO Workshop In situ structural biology: expanding the toolbox for structural cell biology. Ziyu and Alkin attend the NYC Computer Vision Day 2025 at NYU to present our lab’s work. Our group convenes for a potluck dinner in celebration of the new academic semester!
Jan	Ellen gives a talk at the Stanford Data Science seminar series “Scientific Discovery in the Age of Data & AI” in Palo Alto, California. First alpha version of CryoDRGN version 4.0.0 is now released!

Earlier news (2022–2024)

2024

Dec	CryoDRGN version 3.4.3 is now released! The cryoDRGN-AI article on bioRxiv has been updated. E.Z. Lab visits Vancouver, Canada to attend NeurIPS 2024, presenting Hydra and CryoBench!
Nov	Robert Heeter starts rotating in the group, welcome! Rish attends and presents a poster at the 5th Molecular Machine Learning (MoML) Conference at MIT. Zeming Lin (EvolutionaryScale) visits the lab to give a talk on the state-of-the-art protein language models. CryoDRGN version 3.4.2 is now released!
Oct	Yichi Zhang joins the group as a masters student, welcome! Ellen visits Cambridge, Massachusetts to give a talk at the 12th Symposium for Structural Proteomics. CryoDRGN version 3.4.1 is now released! Alkin and Rish give flash talks and present posters at the Princeton-Nature Conference, 3rd Frontiers in Electron Microscopy for Physical and Life Sciences.
Sep	Delighted to welcome Ziyu Xiong as a Ph.D. student to the group, Ambri Ma as a masters student, and Foyez Alauddin, Emmanuel Mhrous, and Kohei Sanno for their undergraduate thesis projects! CryoBench (Spotlight) and Hydra are accepted to NeurIPS 2024! Ryan wins the best talk award in the Princeton MolBio Retreat. Alkin, Minkyu, Rish, and Ziyu visit Poconos, Pennsylvania to give talks at the Princeton ImageX Labs (PIXL) Retreat. CryoDRGN version 3.4.0 is now released!
Aug	Ryan and Rish give a talk and cryoDRGN workshop at the EMBO cryoEM course in EMBL Heidelberg. Ellen visits Shenzhen, China to give a talk at 15th K.H. Kuo International Symposium on Cryo-EM Technology. Ellen gives a talk in the launch event of AI for Accelerating Invention (AI^2), a new Princeton AI Lab initiative.
Jul	Cloris joins the group for a summer internship. Welcome!
Jun	Ellen was interviewed for a Quanta magazine feature on machine learning for structural biology. CryoDRGN version 3.3.3 is now released! Recent talks about our group’s work: “Machine Learning for Protein Structure Determination” at Simons Institute Workshop AI≡Science, in Berkeley. “Neural Fields for Structural Biology” at CVPR Workshops on Computer Vision for Science and Fine-Grained Visual Categorization. “Ab Initio Reconstruction of Cellular Landscapes with cryoDRGN” as the keynote talk at 3D-EM Gordon Research Seminar, in Barcelona, Spain.
May	Our two preprints are posted, describing: DRGN-AI for ab initio heterogeneous cryo-EM reconstruction, ADP-3D for conditioning a diffusion model in protein space with any observations for which the measurement process can be physically modeled. AlphaFold 3 is published! CryoDRGN versions 3.3.1 and 3.3.2 are now released! Congratulations to our graduating seniors Vicky and David for their awards, including the Outstanding Computer Science Senior Thesis Prize and the Computer Science Service Award to Vicky, and the Jeffrey O. Kephart ‘80 Prize in Engineering Physics to David! Our group’s end of semester dinner!
Apr	CryoDRGN version 3.3.0 and version 3.2.0-beta are now released! Ellen gives a talk at CCP-EM Spring Symposium in Nottingham, UK. Alkin, David, Minkyu, Rish, and Ellen attend the NYC Computer Vision Day 2024 at NYU to present our lab’s work.
Mar	Ellen gives a talk at EMBO | EMBL Symposium on AI & Biology, in EMBL Heidelberg, Germany.
Jan	Adele Peng joins the group as an undergraduate researcher, and Jay Golden starts rotating in the group. Ellen gives a talk at the EMBL Industry Workshop “Cryo-EM in academia and industry.”

2023

Dec	CryoDRGN version 3.1.0 is now released! Congratulations to Ryan, who was selected as a Presidential Postdoctoral Research Fellow. Ellen attends NeurIPS, organizes the MLSB Workshop, and speaks at both the Deep Learning and Inverse Problems and Generative AI and Biology Workshops. Ellen visits UC Berkeley and gives a talk at the Center for Computational Biology (CCB) Seminar series.
Nov	Ellen visits Toronto, Canada to give a talk at the Toronto Vision Seminar. Alkin, David, Minkyu, Rish, and Ellen attend the 2023 Molecular Machine Learning (MoML) Conference at MIT. The group presents two posters, and Ellen speaks at the panel “Molecular ML: The Most Important Challenges.” Rish gives a talk in Materials Imaging Workshop at Princeton.
Oct	Ellen visits Stockholm, Sweden to attend and open the 6th CryoNET Symposium as a keynote speaker. Vincent Sitzmann (MIT) visits the lab for a CS Colloquium on “3D-aware Representation Learning for Vision”. Alkin, David, and Rish attend the Boston Biotech Trip of the Princeton Biotech Group.
Sep	Delighted to welcome Minkyu Jeon as a Ph.D. student to the group, Alkin Kaz as a masters student, and Vicky Feng and David Shusten for their undergraduate thesis projects! Axel gives a talk on “Deep learning for ab initio reconstruction in cryo-EM” at a CECAM workshop in Lausanne, Switzerland. John Jumper visits from DeepMind for a Distinguished CS Colloquium on “Highly accurate protein structure prediction with deep learning”. Ellen visits MIT and gives a talk at the Bioinformatics Seminar series. Ellen also attends the Atlantic Festival as a speaker at the panel “Genentech Presents: What Would It Take to Transform Drug Discovery With AI?”
Aug	Our preprint describing cryoDRGN-ET for in situ reconstruction of dynamic protein complexes is posted! Check out our tweet thread here and code release in cryoDRGN version 3.0.0-beta.
Jul	Ryan Feathers joins the group as a postdoctoral fellow, co-advised by Fred Hughson, after completing his Ph.D. at Cornell. Michal Grzadkowski joins as a full-time resesarch software engineer. Welcome! Ellen attends the Symposium on Geometry Processing in Genoa, Italy, and gives a talk at American Crystallography Association annual meeting.
Jun	Ellen visits EMBL Heidelberg for a seminar and cryoDRGN workshop. Updated cryoDRGN version 2.3.0 documentation now available. Our review on “Conformational Heterogeneity and probability distributions from single-particle cryo-electron microscopy” is published! Ellen and Axel attend the Cryo-EM methods workshop at the Flatiron Institute in NYC.
May	Ramya Rangan joins the group after completing her Ph.D. at Stanford! Welcome! Ellen visits University of Michigan for a cryoDRGN workshop and gives talks at the Princeton Catalysis Initiative symposium and at the University of Pennslyvania Structural Biology Symposium. CryoDRGN version 2.3.0 is now released! Ellen gives a talk on “Neural Fields for Structural Biology” at the ICLR Neural Fields across Fields workshop. Mark presents his master’s thesis and graduates with his MEng in ECE. Congratulations! Niko Grigorieff (UMass Med, HHMI) visits the lab and gives a talk in the Princeton structural biology colloquium series.
Apr	Ellen gives talks at the Caltech AI4Science seminar series, Stanford SCIEN seminar series, and UC Davis Department of Biochemistry. Axel and Ellen attend the NYC-area cryo-EM meeting at Rockefeller University. Axel gives a SLAC public lecture on our work, “Capturing Molecular Motion using Artificial Intelligence”.
Mar	Code release! Stable release of cryoDRGN2’s ab initio reconstruction tools are now available in cryodrgn version 2.2.0. Open source code for cryoFIRE, described in Levy et al. 2022, is now available . Ellen gives talks at Columbia Medical School, the North American Microscopy Society meeting, and the University of Washington Institute of Protein Design (IPD).
Feb	Ellen attends Biophysical Society and gives a talk at the cryo-EM subgroup symposium.
Jan	Happy 2023! Ellen visits Utah for a seminar at BYU Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry.

2022

Dec	EZ lab attends NeurIPS. Axel presents cryoFIRE and Karsten presents latent space diffusion models in cryoDRGN. Ellen organizes the 3rd MLSB workshop at NeurIPS - over 80 posters and in person for the first time.
Nov	Tamjeed starts rotating in the group. Rish and Mark join as Masters students. John Ingraham visits from Generate Biomedicines for a CS Colloquium on “Illuminating protein space with a programmable generative model“. Ellen gives talks at a CZI workshop on Computational Frontiers in Cryo-ET, at the Institute for Applied Mathematics (IPAM), at a cryo-EM course at Cold Springs Harbor Lab, and at a Flatiron Institute Workshop on Sampling, Diffusion, and Transport.
Oct	Axel and Fred visit from Stanford for the first EZ lab group meeting, joint with Amit Singer’s group. Ellen gives a talk at the MIT Molecular Machine Learning Conference, the Yale Department of Statistics and Data Science, Purdue Computer Science, and the Rutgers University Institute for Quantitative Biomedicine / RCSB PDB.
Sep	Peter starts rotating in the group. Michael Figurnov from DeepMind gives a talk on AlphaFold at Princeton CS as part of Ellen’s new Machine Learning for Structural Biology seminar class. Ellen gives talks at Van Andel Institute, and the Princeton-Nature Conference on Electron Microscopy for Physical and Life Sciences.
Aug	Ellen visits Portland, Oregon and gives a talk on CryoDRGN2 at Microscopy and Microanalysis 2022.
Jul	Ellen starts her appointment at Princeton CS.