About Me
Alex Windels
I'm a protein designer and postdoctoral researcher at UGent's Centre for Synthetic Biology. I don't just study proteins — I build ones that don't exist in nature yet, or improve the ones that do. Designing backbones, optimizing sequences, predicting structures, engineering function from scratch. And increasingly, doing it with AI tools that are quietly making the impossible merely difficult.
Protein design sits at a fascinating crossroads right now. The biology is hard. The computational tools are advancing faster than most labs can absorb. And the distance between a cool result and something that actually works in the real world remains humbling.
Expertise
What I work on
Spanning computational biology, AI-driven design, and hands-on protein engineering.
Protein Design & Engineering
De novo backbone design, sequence optimization, and structure prediction for proteins with novel functions.
Synthetic Biology
Building biological systems and components that go beyond what nature provides.
Computational Biology
Applying computational methods to understand and engineer biological molecules at the atomic level.
AI/ML for Protein Engineering
Leveraging machine learning tools including AlphaFold and generative models for protein design workflows.
HPC Infrastructure
Running and setting up large-scale computational pipelines on high-performance computing clusters.
Biophysical & Therapeutic Interpretation
Interpreting computational protein designs in biophysical and therapeutically relevant contexts — bridging the gap between in silico predictions and real-world function.
Education
PhD in Bioscience Engineering
Ghent University
2020–2025
MSc in Industrial Engineering, Biochemistry
2018–2020
Let's connect
Redesigning proteins, or is evolution's original design giving you a hard time? Let's talk.