McWhite Lab
We develop computational approaches to understand protein function, evolution, and organization, with a focus on interpretability of large language models of biomolecules and gene expression.
Areas of Research: Protein language model interpretability, agentic programming, algorithms for bioinformatics, systems biology, proteomics, evolution
Recent News
2025, R Shaw, SD Love, CD McWhite, “Evaluating pretrained protein language model embeddings as proxies for functional similarity”, Journal of Molecular Evolution, 1–12
2025, A Shamail and CD McWhite, “Automated Protein Motif Localization using Concept Activation Vectors in Protein Language Model Embedding Space”, arXiv, arXiv:2511.21614
2025, A Shamail and CD McWhite, “A General Algorithm for Detecting Higher-Order Interactions via Random Sequential Additions”, arXiv, arXiv:2512.11793
Lab Members
Principal Investigator
Claire McWhite, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, University of Arizona
Graduate Students
- Samuel Love
- Robert Shaw
- Ahmad Shamail
Availability
Claire McWhite is available for consulting, advising, and talks in protein language models, single-cell language models, and bioinformatics, including building intuition for how protein and single-cell foundation models work internally, and applications of language models to biological problems.
Please reach out at clairemcwhite@arizona.edu.
Contact
clairemcwhite@arizona.edu
Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology
The University of Arizona