Gonzalo Benegas

Research Scientist at Open Athena | AI for Science

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I enjoy doing applied ML research, especially drawing connections between fields. In the last couple years, I’ve been developing DNA language models to predict the effect of genetic mutations in humans and plants.

I hold a PhD in Computational Biology from UC Berkeley and a Licentiate in Computer Science from the University of Buenos Aires.

selected publications

2025

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    A DNA language model based on multispecies alignment predicts the effects of genome-wide variants
    Gonzalo Benegas, Carlos Albors, Alan J Aw, Chengzhong Ye, and Yun S Song
    Nature Biotechnology, 2025
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    Genomic language models: opportunities and challenges
    Gonzalo Benegas*, Chengzhong Ye*, Carlos Albors*, Jianan Canal Li*, and Yun S Song
    Trends in Genetics, 2025

2023

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    DNA language models are powerful predictors of genome-wide variant effects
    Gonzalo Benegas, Sanjit Singh Batra, and Yun S. Song
    Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2023