Mr Josef Hanke

College position: Bye-Fellow

Mr Josef Hanke is the Bye-fellow in the Sciences at Magdalene.

Josef studied Mathematics (MA) at the University of Edinburgh (2019–23), spending his third year at the University of British Columbia in Canada. He graduated top of his year, receiving the Napier Medal and Gangadhar Balwant Gadgil Prize, as well as the William and Isabella Dick Prize for the best final-year dissertation. Alongside his studies, Josef developed an interest in biomedical research, working as a Clinical Research Coordinator and Administrator at the University of Oxford in 2021 on the OCTAVE COVID-19 vaccine trial. In the summer of 2023, he worked as a Research Assistant in the University of Cambridge Biostatistics Unit, under the supervision of Professor Paul Kirk and Dr Romit Samanta, researching cytokine data from patients with acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) to investigate relationships with clinical outcomes and drug response.

Josef then completed an MPhil in Computational Biology at the University of Cambridge (2024), before spending the summer researching drug specificity and side effects in Professor Michele Vendruscolo’s lab in the Department of Chemistry. In 2025, Josef joined Professor Vendruscolo’s lab as a PhD student, supported by a four-year studentship from AstraZeneca, and joined Magdalene as a postgraduate student. His research combines machine learning and molecular biology to develop methods for predicting the specificity of drugs, modelling intermolecular interactions, and identifying efficient synthetic routes for drug molecules. Ultimately, his work aims to contribute to the development of safer medicines and the discovery of novel therapeutics for neurodegenerative diseases, with a particular focus on Alzheimer’s disease.

Research Interest

  • Machine Learning
  • Drug discovery
  • Drug safety
  • Alzheimer's disease

Qualifications

  • MA (Hons) Mathematics, University of Edinburgh
  • MPhil Computational Biology, University of Cambridge

KEY PUBLICATIONS

ZeroFold: Protein–RNA Binding Affinity Predictions from Pre-Structural Embeddings. Hanke, J., Ojeda, S., Zhang, S., Czechtizky, W., De Maria, L., Vendruscolo, M. arXiv, 2026. [In submission].

OmniBind: Proteome-Wide Promiscuity Predictions for Early-Stage Drug Screening. Hanke, J., Ojeda, S., Cheong, R., Glasstetter, Baker, E., Lam, H., Brezinova, M., Louet, A., Zhang, S., Vendruscolo, M. bioRxiv, 2026. [In submission].

Connectedness in Weighted Consensus Division of Graphical Cakes between Two Agents. Hanke, J., Pires, A. Mathematical Social Sciences, 2025.