Info
Szymon Szrajer
Work address
Biosystems Data Analysis, University of Amsterdam
Room C2.202, Science Park 904, 1098 XH, Amsterdam
Email: s.p.szrajer@uva.nl
Professional Career
I earned a BSc in Bioinformatics from Jagiellonian University in Kraków in 2022. During my undergraduate studies, I completed two computational internships at the Polish Academy of Sciences and Ardigen. Toward the end of my bachelor’s program, I began training at the Ylla Lab, which continued throughout my master’s, focusing on genome annotation and the study of small RNA-related proteins across diverse branches of the tree of life using genomics. In the second year of my master’s, I joined BGI Research in Shenzhen to study caste differentiation in ants using high-throughput sequencing data. I graduated with a MSc (cum laude) in Bioinformatics from Jagiellonian University in 2024. Afterward, I briefly worked at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology (IBE, CSIC-UPF) in Barcelona as a research assistant, continuing my research in these areas. Since 2025, I have been pursuing a PhD in the Biosystems Data Analysis group, focusing on protein structure-based machine learning for enzyme specificity prediction.
Research
Machine learning, particularly sequence-based approaches, has been increasingly applied in recent years to enhance the understanding of proteins. Integrating protein structure information into these models provides a more comprehensive perspective beyond primary sequence data when making predictions. In my PhD project, I leverage this additional protein structure information in machine learning models to predict product specificity of plant terpene synthases.