Dr. Kalli Kappel

Biography

Kalli Kappel received a B.S. in Physics from the University of California, San Diego. She worked with Professor Andrew McCammon to study protein dynamics and protein-ligand interactions using computational approaches. Kalli completed her Ph.D. in Biophysics at Stanford University, where she focused on developing computational methods to predict RNA structures and RNA-protein interactions under the guidance of Professor Rhiju Das. Her graduate work was supported by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and the Gabilan Stanford Graduate Fellowship. After obtaining her Ph.D., Kalli became an HHMI Hanna Gray Postdoctoral Fellow and a Schmidt Science Fellow at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where she developed and applied high-throughput experimental approaches to characterize relationships between protein sequences and nuclear condensate formation. Kalli will join the UCLA faculty in July 2025, where her lab will focus on developing predictive sequence-structure-function models for RNA, proteins, and their interactions, combining high-throughput experiments with machine learning and computational biophysical methods.

Research Interests