Lazar Atanackovic

Area of Study / Keywords

AI Robotics and Machine Learning Biomedical Engineering Software Engineering and Intelligent Systems Generative Models Deep Learning Representation Learning Computational Biology Dynamical Systems Single-cell

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About

I am an Assistant Professor cross-appointed in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering and in the Department of Biochemistry, and Adjunct in Computing Science. I am also a Canada CIFAR AI Chair and a Research Fellow at the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii). Previously, I was a Postdoc at the Eric & Wendy Schmidt Center of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. I received my PhD from the University of Toronto in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering. During this time, I was a graduate research student at the Vector Institute and a member of the Probabilistic and Statistical Inference Group supervised by Brendan Frey and co-supervised by Bo Wang. I also spent time as a research intern at Recursion Pharmaceuticals / Valence Labs, Deep Genomics, and Mila - Quebec AI Institute. 

My research focuses on developing machine learning methods for understanding and modeling natural (physical) systems from data, with a particular focus on cellular and molecular biology. My interests include generative modeling (flows and diffusion), deep learning, causality, single-cell biology, and recently, proteins & molecules.

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Research

I lead the Atanackovic Lab at the University of Alberta! We are a multidisciplinary research group with the ultimate goal of engineering biology with AI. To achieve this goal, we develop machine learning methods to understand and model natural (physical) systems from data, with a strong focus on cellular 🧫 and molecular 🧬 systems. Our research broadly spans machine learning, generative modelling, causality, systems biology, single-cell biology, and most recently protein & molecule design. We combine theoretical advances with practical applications to push the boundaries of what’s possible in computational biology and AI.

I am recruiting students on a rolling basis! If you are interested in working on cutting edge problems at the intersection of machine learning, biology, biochemistry, and health, please fill out this application form!

Katarina Petrović, Lazar Atanackovic, Viggo Moro, Kacper Kapuśniak, İsmail İlkan Ceylan, Michael Bronstein, Avishek Joey Bose, Alexander Tong

NeurIPS. 2025 December;

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Noah El Rimawi-Fine*, Adam Stecklov*, Lucas Nelson, Mathieu Blanchette, Alexander Tong, Stephen Y. Zhang, Lazar Atanackovic

arXiv. 2025 October;

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Lazar Atanackovic*, Xi Zhang*, Brandon Amos, Mathieu Blanchette, Leo J. Lee, Yoshua Bengio, Alexander Tong, Kirill Neklyudov

ICLR. 2025 April;

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Marta Skreta*, Lazar Atanackovic*, Avishek Joey Bose, Alexander Tong, Kirill Neklyudov

ICLR [Spotlight]. 2025 April;

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Lazar Atanackovic, Emmanuel Bengio

TMLR. 2025 April;

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Kirill Neklyudov*, Rob Brekelmans*, Alexander Tong, Lazar Atanackovic, Qiang Liu, Alireza Makhzani

ICML. 2024 July;

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Alexander Tong*, Nikolay Malkin*, Kilian Fatras*, Lazar Atanackovic, Yanlei Zhang, Guillaume Huguet, Guy Wolf, Yoshua Bengio

AISTATS. 2024 May;

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Lazar Atanackovic*, Alexander Tong*, Bo Wang, Leo J. Lee, Yoshua Bengio, Jason Hartford

NeurIPS. 2023 December;

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