Author

Mahdi Belcaid

University of Hawaiʻi at MānoaORCID 0009-0004-5185-0643Unclaimed ORCID profile · follow to get notified of new preprints

Biology Disciplines

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Bioinformatics· 2

Signature Assays, Organisms & Methods

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Assay:protein sequence· 2 Organism:virus· 2 Research Focus:benchmarking· 1 Approach:machine learning (classical)· 1 Research Focus:protein design· 1 Research Focus:protein structure prediction· 1 Approach:transformer / foundation model· 1

Frequent Co-Authors

Barbra D. FerrelliD· 2 shared K. Eric WommackiD· 2 shared Rajan SawhneyiD· 2 shared Shawn W. PolsoniD· 2 shared Thibaut DejeaniD· 2 shared William HarriganiD· 2 shared Zachary D. SchreiberiD· 2 shared

Activity by Year

2025-2026 · peak 1/yr

Co-Author Collaboration Network

7 top collaborators · 21 mutual co-author links

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2 shared papersBioinformatics

Barbra D. FerrellORCID

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Author profile →

2 papers

Recent·Most cited

EXTENDING PROTEIN LANGUAGE MODELS TO A VIRAL GENOMIC SCALE USING BIOLOGICALLY INDUCED SPARSE ATTENTION

Thibaut Dejean, Barbra D. Ferrell, William Harrigan, Zachary D. Schreiber, Rajan Sawhney, K. Eric Wommack, Shawn W. Polson, Mahdi Belcaid

This paper extends protein language models to a viral genomic scale using sparse attention, improving embeddings for long-range interprotein interactions.

GigaScience · Jan 1, 2026Peer-reviewedBioinformatics

Fine-Tuning Protein Language Models Unlocks the Potential of Underrepresented Viral Proteomes

Rajan Sawhney, Barbra D. Ferrell, Thibaut Dejean, Zachary D. Schreiber, William Harrigan, Shawn W. Polson, K. Eric Wommack, Mahdi Belcaid

This study fine-tunes pre-trained protein language models on viral protein sequences to improve their performance on downstream tasks and representation quality.

PeerJ · Sep 18, 2025Peer-reviewedBioinformatics