RNA Structure, Function, and Design

RNA biology becomes much more informative when structure, folding pathways, and molecular context are considered together, rather than treating sequence alone as the main source of meaning.

I am Michael T. Wolfinger, and my work focuses on the computational side of that problem: structure prediction, folding kinetics, structure-aware RNA design, RNA-protein recognition, and structured viral RNAs. The aim is not only to model RNA, but to understand which representations are biologically meaningful and which conclusions they can actually support.

I am a Principal Investigator at the University of Vienna and affiliated with the Theoretical Biochemistry Group (TBI), a long-standing centre for RNA bioinformatics and home of the ViennaRNA Package.

Across my research, the common thread is a structure-aware view of RNA function, regulation, and design.