Gorka Lasso (Group Leader)
Gorka Lasso founded his research group in 2025 at University College London, driven by a passion for understanding how protein sequence, structure, and function are linked—especially in the context of viral infectious diseases.
His scientific journey began with a broad interest in proteins across diverse biological systems, but since 2013, his focus has centred on viruses and their interactions with their hosts. During his postdoctoral work at Columbia University in New York, he used a structure-based Bayesian network to predict and model the virus–human protein interactome, and developed a novel sequence-to-structure approach to reveal hidden virus–host structural relationships.
As a Research Assistant Professor at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, Gorka expanded his work to investigate the immunological properties of viral proteins and their role in disease. In addition, he and his team identified naturally occurring amino acid variants that shape filovirus susceptibility by integrating experimental approaches and machine learning to uncover the molecular rules underpinning the interaction between the viral glycoprotein and its receptor.