Uxía Veleiro

my doctoral research

During my Ph.D., I focused on applying AI to drug discovery, particularly on predicting interactions between drugs and their biological targets. Understanding these interactions is an important step in identifying potential new uses for existing drugs.

My research explored how Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) can address this challenge. In collaboration with other researchers, we evaluated state-of-the-art prediction models, identified their strengths and limitations, and proposed guidelines for future developments. This work was published in Nature Machine Intelligence (2025) and presented at the AI4D3 Workshop at NeurIPS 2023. I also led the development of GeNNius, a GNN model that predicts drug–target interactions several orders of magnitude faster than existing approaches, published in Bioinformatics (2024).

During these years, I had the opportunity to travel to international conferences, meet inspiring people from different backgrounds, and exchange ideas that broadened my perspective beyond my own research.