Sylvain Dehayem

I’m Sylvain Dehayem, a master’s student in Artificial Intelligence at École Polytechnique. I previously completed a third year in Informatics Engineering at École Nationale Supérieure Polytechnique Yaoundé (Cameroon). Before joining Columbia, I worked as a research intern at DXO Labs on diffusion models for image inpainting. During this internship, I explored diffusion-based generative models for high-quality image reconstruction. This experience deepened my interest in probabilistic modeling and generative AI. At Columbia, I will apply these concepts to guided diffusion models for protein design, working under the mentorship of Dr. Aaron Zweig, Dr. Mingxuan Zhang, and Prof. Elham Azizi. I’m excited to learn from an interdisciplinary research environment and to contribute to methods that connect generative modeling with biological sequence design.

I’m excited to explore how diffusion models can be adapted for biological system design, especially in protein engineering. I’m also looking forward to learning from my mentors and contributing to an interdisciplinary research team.