Ben Perry
Research Intern
About
Ben Perry is a Ph.D. student in Biomedical Engineering at Duke University advised by Philip Romero. His research focuses on creating algorithmic methods to design enzymes that catalyze entirely novel chemical reactions and experimentally testing these “new-to-nature” designs with a automated laboratory robotics setup. Recently, he has worked on methods to identify evolvable starting points for directed evolution from naturally occurring proteins and methods to accelerate protein structure prediction algorithms like AlphaFold3 and Boltz-2. Furthermore, Ben has a deep interest in teaching and helped developed the curriculum for deep learning for protein design and laboratory automation at Duke. In 2025, Ben was a recipient of the Natural Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship.