Professor Charlotte Deane MBE

Professor of Structural Bioinformatics

About

I lead the Oxford Protein Informatics Group (OPIG), a research group of over 20 people working on diverse problems across immunoinformatics, protein structure and small molecule drug discovery; using statistics, AI and computation to generate biological and medical insight.

In January 2024, I became Executive Chair of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).

I am also co-director of the Systems Approaches to Biomedical Research Centre for Doctoral Training which I founded in 2009.

Between 2022 - 2023, I was Chief Scientist of Biologics AI at Exscientia, a biotech company where I led its computational scientific development. 

During the COVID-19 pandemic, I served on SAGE, the UK Government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies and acted as UK Research and Innovation’s COVID-19 Response Director.

I have  held numerous senior roles at the University of Oxford, including Head of the Department of Statistics and Deputy Head of the Mathematical, Physical and Life Sciences (MPLS) division.

In the 2022 Birthday Honours, I was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) for services to COVID-19 research.

Research Interests

My research covers several areas in protein structure prediction and protein interaction networks, combining both theoretical work and empirical analyses. We work on developing novel methodologies to understand and predict protein evolution, interaction, structure and function. Our work is focussed in the four main areas listed below:

  • Protein structure
  • Immunoinformatics
  • Biological Networks
  • Small molecules

In OPIG, we develop novel algorithms, tools and databases that are openly available to the community. These tools are widely used web resources and are also part of several Pharma drug discovery pipelines.

For more information about the research and members of the Oxford Protein Informatics Group, see our group web pages. A list of all software developed in my group can also be found here.

Career History

  • Professor, Department of Statistics, University of Oxford (2008 - present)
  • Executive Chair of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (2024 - present)
  • Chief Scientist of Biologics AI at Exscientia (2021 - 2023)
  • Deputy Executive Chair of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (2019 - 2021)
  • Scientific Expert, Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) (2021)
  • COVID Response Director, UK Research and Innovation (2020 – December 2021)
  • Head of Department of Statistics (2015 - 2019)
  • Deputy Head of the Mathematical Physical and Life Sciences (MPLS) Division (2018 - 2020)
  • Associate Head (Research) of MPLS Division (2014 - 2019)
  • Associate Head (Impact and Innovation) of MPLS Division (2013 – 2014)
  • Director - Systems Approaches to Biomedical Research Centre for Doctoral Training (2009 - present)
  • Director - Systems Biology Doctoral Training Centre (2007 – 2009)
  • University Lecturer, Department of Statistics, University of Oxford (2002 - 2008)
  • Welcome Trust Research Fellow, University of California Los Angeles (2000 - 2002)

Publications

Quast, N., Deane, C. and Raybould, M. (2025) “STCRpy: a software suite for T cell receptor structure parsing, interaction profiling and machine learning dataset preparation”, bioRxiv.
Greenshields-Watson, A. et al. (2025) “ANARCII: A Generalised Language Model for Antigen Receptor Numbering”, bioRxiv.
Cagiada, M. et al. (2025) “AF2χ: Predicting protein side-chain rotamer distributions with AlphaFold2”, bioRxiv.
Ziv, Y. et al. (2025) “MolSnapper: Conditioning Diffusion for Structure-Based Drug Design.”, Journal of chemical information and modeling [Preprint].
Cutting, D. et al. (2025) “<i>De Novo</i> Antibody Design with SE(3) Diffusion.”, Journal of computational biology : a journal of computational molecular cell biology, 32(4), pp. 351–361.
Høie, M. et al. (2025) “AntiFold: improved structure-based antibody design using inverse folding”, Bioinformatics Advances, 5(1).
Mokaya, M., Deane, C. and Bradley, A. (2025) “Expanding the Synthome: Generating and integrating novel reactions into retrosynthesis tools”, bioRxiv.
Quast, N. et al. (2025) “T-cell receptor structures and predictive models reveal comparable alpha and beta chain structural diversity despite differing genetic complexity”, Communications Biology, 8(1).
Huhn, A. et al. (2025) “Publisher Correction: The molecular reach of antibodies crucially underpins their viral neutralisation capacity.”, Nature communications, 16(1), p. 2761.
Valsson, Í et al. (2025) “Narrowing the gap between machine learning scoring functions and free energy perturbation using augmented data”, Communications Chemistry, 8(1).

Media

Contact

College affiliation: Fellow at St Anne's College

Email:  deane@stats.ox.ac.uk

Phone number (Department): +44 (0)1865 272860

Phone number (Direct): +44 (0)1865 281301 

Office number: 2.16

PA:  Lauren Haynes

Current Research Students

Tobias Hegelund Olsen

Martin Buttenschoen

Leo Klarner

Sarah Robinson

Lewis Chinery

Anna Carbery

Lucy Vost

Brennan Abanades Kenyon

Research Groups

Oxford Protein Informatics Group

Computational Biology and Bioinformatics

Computational Statistics and Machine Learning

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