Community Newsletter
March 2026 - 18th Edition
Catch-Up With Jeff
Where in the world did Jeff visit? Keep reading to find out!
As the Executive Director of Rosetta Commons, I have the privilege of sharing my work and our community culture with others when I travel. As I know many in the community share my passion for the world around us, in this new monthly series, I will share updates from Rosetta Commons, but also travels that I go on. I hope that you all will share your travels with me whenever we are able to meet up next.
In late February, I was fortunate to head up to Boston, Massachusetts to present for the Boston Protein Design and Modeling Club, a group that we sponsor through our licensing revenue. If you haven’t checked out their series, visit their website to see a rich resource of past presentations and a schedule for the ones planned for this year. First, I want to thank Sergey Ovchinnikov (MIT) and Chris Bahl (AI Proteins) for their amazing hospitality. The mix of students, faculty, and industry scientists, and the fellowship they shared with food and drink, the insightful and engaged questions, and the long after-session discussing science with everyone were highlights of my visit. I hope it was stimulating to think about the different scientific traditions of AI, physics and biology, and how we can learn from them to accelerate our work in understanding protein interactions, antibody engineering, and protein design.
I also visited Dartmouth to give the Jones Seminar on Science Technology and Society. I’d like to thank my hosts, Emme Burgin, another computational protein engineer, and Jiwon Lee, who collects antibody repertoire data. After the talk, I was able to ‘ski the East’ before heading home. Both talks will be available online soon.
Lastly, in case you missed it, Summer RosettaCon registration is now open. If you haven’t had a chance to register yet, know that early bird registration closes March 31. I look forward to seeing many of you in Seattle in August.
Cheers,
Jeff
Latest News
Megathon 2026
Megathon 2026 became Rosetta Commons’s first ever dual hackathon in one. Hosted in San Juan, Puerto Rico, students and researchers gathered to participate in one of two tracks, Tutorial Hackathon or Data Bazaar Hackathon, for a week of collaboration and learning on March 2 – 6, 2026.
RC-Run
We are pleased to announce a new Rosetta Commons workflow optimization tool: rc-run. rc-run (invoked as rc) is a command-line utility tool for running containerized and native biomolecular software.
RDF3 Tutorials
We’re excited to announce that three introductory tutorials for RFdiffusion3 (RFD3) are now available in the Foundry documentation.
Upcoming Events
Summer RosettaCon 2026
Early bird registration closes March 31
Summer RosettaCon is an annual conference for all computational protein modeling and design enthusiasts. Focused on "Biomolecule Engineering: From Principle to Practice" this year, we will gather at the University of Washington in Seattle, on August 3 - 7 for discussions, collaborations, and more.
European RosettaCon 2026
Focused on "Crossing Boundaries with Protein Design" this year, we will gather at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa in Lisbon, Portugal on October 28 - 30.
How To Train Your Model
Bookending Summer RosettaCon, join us for an immersive, project-based learning experience for moving beyond "out-of-the-box" models. Machine learning experience required.
Membership Spotlight
Hannah Wayment-Steele
Assistant Professor of Biochemistry
University of Wisconsin-Madison
ABOUT HANNAH
Hannah majored in chemistry and math at Pomona College, and studied theoretical chemistry at Cambridge University as a Churchill scholar. She completed her Ph.D. in Chemistry at Stanford University with Vijay Pande and Rhiju Das, using machine learning to tackle problems related to protein and RNA conformational ensembles. She then was a Jane Coffin Childs postdoctoral fellow with Dorothee Kern and visiting researcher at Google Brain with Lucy Colwell. She started her lab at University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2025. When Hannah has free time, she enjoys playing with her two bunnies or going for a row out on the lake near Madison.
SCIENTIFIC ENDEAVORS
Hannah’s lab’s major aim is to obtain a predictive understanding of protein dynamics. They do this by combining deep learning and experiments to better understand how biomolecular dynamics works. Currently, those motions are hard to study, so Hannah’s lab is building tools to make it easier. One area in particular has her attention, and that’s NMR spectroscopy. They are working on ways to study dynamics with NMR in high throughput, something that would greatly benefit our understanding of how molecules interact with each other for biological functions.
ROSETTA COMMUNITY
Hannah has been a part of the Rosetta community since grad school, but now as a PI she gets to see her students attend workshops and meetings, then come back with great ideas. “I value the openness Rosetta has around science, because it helps fuel scientific growth,” Hannah said.
ADVICE FOR NEW ROSETTA STUDENTS
You are a trainee, now is the time to get the training you want. Don’t limit yourself, rather take a chance to explore all your interests to help you get where you want to go. Where that is might just end up surprising you in the best way.
FUN FACT: Hannah used to row competitively!
Announcements
Call for Contributions
Protein Design Teaching & Learning Resources
The Rosetta Commons Education Committee is building a curated, openly accessible collection of protein design teaching resources — spanning traditional Rosetta software and modern ML-based tools — and is seeking community contributions to make it as comprehensive as possible. Eligible resources include tutorials, lecture slides, notebooks, videos, protocol write-ups, and reading lists, as long as they are publicly accessible. To contribute, submit a link and brief description via email to awvater@ucdavis.edu, the #teaching channel on Rosetta Slack, or the online submission form.
Rosetta Commons Jobs
Check out our jobs page for the latest postings.
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