Westlake University
academicWestlake is a young (est. 2018) private research university in Hangzhou that punches far above its size in one specific arena: scientific foundation models. Where most of the Chinese academic index is anchored by language and reasoning work, Westlake's center of gravity is protein and physical-science FMs, and its output map is best read lab by lab.
Fajie Yuan's protein-FM lab (westlake-repl / "AI4Protein") is the anchor. It built SaProt, the structure-aware PLM ranked #1 on ProteinGym, and a full stack around it — the ProTrek trimodal retriever, the SaprotHub collaboration platform (Nature Biotechnology), the 80B-scale Evolla protein-chat model, the text-to-protein designer Pinal, the Cryo-IEF cryo-EM FM, plus the ESM-Ezy and DOMINO design/discovery lines.
Stan Z. Li's AI Lab works on protein/molecule representation learning and geometric deep learning, and authored the PFMBench protein-FM benchmark. Yue Zhang's WestlakeNLP covers LLM reasoning, agents and evaluation — the RL-reasoning method LUFFY and the SuperGPQA benchmark (co-authored with ByteDance Seed / M-A-P and tracked under ByteDance Seed). Tailin Wu's AI for Scientific Simulation & Discovery Lab builds generative (diffusion/flow-matching) models for physics (M2PDE, RealPDEBench), and Donglin Wang's Machine Intelligence Lab (MiLAB) works on robot learning and embodied FMs (OpenHelix).
People
- Fajie Yuan Google Scholar — Assistant Professor, AI Division; PI of the protein-FM lab (westlake-repl / AI4Protein) (formerly Tencent AI)
- Yue Zhang Google Scholar — Full Professor & Associate Dean, School of Engineering; leads WestlakeNLP; ACL Fellow
- Stan Z. Li Google Scholar — Chair Professor of AI; leads the AI Lab (AI for Life Science)
- Tailin Wu Google Scholar — Assistant Professor, Dept. of AI; Director, AI for Scientific Simulation & Discovery Lab
- Donglin Wang Google Scholar — Associate Professor; Founder & Director, Machine Intelligence Lab (MiLAB)