AI+Science Summer School 2026

Hosted at the John Hancock Center from June 22–June 26, the goal of the program is to introduce a new generation of diverse, interdisciplinary graduate students and postdocs to the emerging field of AI+Science. We also hope this program can build community across institutions and spur new research directions focused on AI-enabled scientific discovery across the physical and biological sciences.

The program is organized by the Eric and Wendy Schmidt AI in Science Fellowship program at the University of Chicago and the University of Chicago Data Science Institute. The AI + Science Summer School is co-hosted by the National Institute for Theory and Mathematics in Biology (NITMB) and SkAI Institute at the John Hancock Center in downtown Chicago.

The Week’s Foundations and Materials

Featured speakers’ slide decks and session recordings from each day can be found below:

Monday, June 22:

Greg Shakhnarovich (TTIC / UChicago): “Representation Learning and Foundation Models for Images and Videos (Part I) (Part II).”
Niall Mangan (Northwestern): “Sparse Model Selection for Dynamical Systems: Finding the Limits of Uncertainty (Part I) (Part II).”

A white man in a dark shirt and khaki pants stands behind the podium on the right and he is speaking to rows of participants on the left in an auditorium. — Greg Shakhnarovich kicks off the week’s programming with his “Representation Learning and Foundation Models for Images and Videos” lecture.

Tuesday, June 23:

Earl Bellinger (Yale University): “Clustering Clusters: Searching for Star Clusters with the Gaia Spacecraft (Part I) (Part II).”
Rose Cersonsky (University of Wisconsin): “Interpretability in AI/ML for Chemical Sciences (Part I) (Part II).”

Wednesday, June 24:

Jonathan Weare (NYU): “Learning to Predict Extreme Events (Part I) (Part II).”
Philippe Rigollet (MIT): “Optimal Transport and Transformer Flows with Applications to Single-Cell RNAseq Data (Part I) (Part II).”

Thursday, June 25:

Emma Alexander (Northwestern): “AI for Imaging (Part I) (Part II).”
Ramon Nogueira (UChicago): “Neuroscience and AI (Part I) (Part II).”

Friday, June 26:

Bingqing Cheng (UC Berkeley): “Machine Learning Interatomic Potentials 101 (Part I) (Part II).”
Francisco Villaescusa-Navarro (Flatiron Institute): “AI Agents for Science (Part I) (Part II).”