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Daniel Reker

Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering
Biomedical Engineering

Overview


The Reker lab tightly integrates biomedical data science and wet-lab experiments for the analysis and design of therapeutic opportunities. Automated experimentation can be guided by active machine learning to generate knowledge-rich datasets. A key aspect of our research is improving our understanding of the most effective active machine learning workflows to enable the broad deployment of adaptive machine learning and automated experimentation.

We focus our adaptive model development on critical drug properties such as efficacy, biodistribution, metabolism, toxicity, and side-effects. Prospective applications of these predictions enable us to better understand limitations of currently approved medications as well as design new drug candidates, nanoparticles, and pharmaceutical formulations. By integrating clinical data analysis, we can rapidly validate the translational relevance of our predictions and conceive big data-driven protocols for precision medicine and personalized drug delivery.

Current Duke Appointments & Affiliations


Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering · 2021 - Present Biomedical Engineering, Pratt School of Engineering
Member of the Duke Cancer Institute · 2022 - Present Duke Cancer Institute, Institutes and Centers

Recent News Items


Published October 7, 2025
Creating New Drug Delivery Techniques With AI
Published December 3, 2024
Research & Innovation Seed Grants Total Nearly $2 Million
Published July 31, 2023
Allowing Machine Learning to Ask Questions Can Make It Smarter

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Recent Scholarly Works


Short-Term Memory Active Learning for Drug Development.

Journal article Journal of chemical information and modeling · August 2026 Active learning is a powerful approach for efficient data selection in machine learning, particularly valuable in domains such as drug discovery where data acquisition is costly. Traditional active learning methods continuously expand the training set with ... Full text Cite

Identifying Antibiotic Effects of Investigational Drugs on Commensal Bacteria with Machine Learning.

Journal article ACS pharmacology & translational science · July 2026 Many human-targeted medications have been found to impact patients' gastrointestinal microbiomes, which has been proposed as an unrecognized source of drug side effects, comorbidities, and reduced treatment efficiencies. However, current methods for detect ... Full text Cite

Fine-tuned machine learning models for the discovery of dye nanoparticles with enhanced lung delivery.

Journal article Journal of controlled release : official journal of the Controlled Release Society · July 2026 Drug delivery using self-assembling drug-excipient nanoparticles offers a scalable strategy to improve the solubility, bioavailability, and biodistribution of poorly soluble therapeutics. However, progress in the development and translation of these materi ... Full text Cite
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Recent Grants


Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Training Grant

Inst. Training Prgm or CMEMentor · Awarded by National Institutes of Health · 2026 - 2031

Integrated Training in Anesthesiology Research

Inst. Training Prgm or CMEMentor · Awarded by National Institute of General Medical Sciences · 1996 - 2031

Pharmacological Sciences Training Program

Inst. Training Prgm or CMEPreceptor · Awarded by National Institutes of Health · 2025 - 2030

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Education


Swiss Federal Institute of Technology-ETH Zurich (Switzerland) · 2016 Sc.D.