Pankhil Gawade

I am a PhD researcher at Helmholtz Munich, affiliated with the Technical University of Munich and the ELLIS and ELIZA networks. I hold a bachelor’s degree in Physics and a master’s degree in Statistics and Data Science. My research focuses on generative AI for peptide and protein design, particularly machine learning methods for discovering antimicrobial and therapeutic peptides. I work with protein language models, geometric representation learning, generative modeling, and molecular optimization to design biologically active peptide candidates. Alongside these applications, I conduct research in machine learning theory, with a particular focus on neural collapse, feature learning, kernel methods, and the effects of data geometry and network architecture on learned representations. My work has been published at ICML, Bioinformatics Advances, TAG-DS, and TMLR. I am also a recipient of the Helmholtz AI Accelerator Award and the Deutschlandstipendium from LMU Munich, sponsored by Allianz.