Congratulations to Outgoing Eric and Wendy Schmidt AI in Science Fellows

Eight Eric and Wendy Schmidt AI in Science Fellows are moving on to exciting new roles at leading global institutions in academia and industry. A program of Schmidt Sciences, the AI in Science Fellowship provides early career scholars with training and support to accelerate discovery across the natural sciences and AI. During their Fellowship, Fellows have the opportunity to pursue independent, original research integrating AI methods within their primary research disciplines, spanning departments across the UChicago campus from radiology to cosmological physics.

The uniquely interdisciplinary nature of the Fellowship allows early researchers to investigate AI and machine learning approaches to forge new methods in their own fields. Schmidt AI in Science Fellows also benefit from the experience and perspectives of peers across other diverse fields: Peter Lu, an outgoing Fellow, emphasized the synergistic benefits to his own work, saying the program “has been really ideal for my type of interdisciplinary research [and] provides the freedom for me to work across different departments… Being able to collaborate with folks on very different projects and think about how these different machine learning tools are going to be helpful for a wide variety of people…has been really useful for me.”

“The Fellows’ success on the academic job market underscores the strength of their research and of our Fellowship program,” said DSI’s Faculty Director of AI and Worah Family Professor of Statistics and Computer Science in the Wallman Society of Fellows Rebecca Willett. The eight Fellows’ next placements demonstrate the program’s mission to train the next generation of interdisciplinary scientists accelerating scientific discovery with AI.

Thomas Callister

Thomas Callister will begin a role as Assistant Professor of Astronomy at Williams College. Thomas’s research aims to identify, develop, and deploy machine-learning methods to measure the gravitational waves produced in space, increasing methods’ efficiency and accuracy. You can read Thomas’s publications here.

Fellowship Mentor: Daniel Holz (Professor in the Departments of Physics, Astronomy & Astrophysics, the Enrico Fermi Institute, and the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics).

Peter Lu

Peter Lu, has accepted a position as an Assistant Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Tufts University. Peter’s research focuses on designing machine learning methods for specific scientific applications and physical systems in order to improve interpretability, generalization performance, and data efficiency. You can learn more about Peter at his website, check out his publications, and watch a video about his research.

Fellowship Mentors: Vincenzo Vitelli (Professor of Physics) and Rebecca Willett (Worah Family Professor of Statistics and Computer Science in the Wallman Society of Fellows;                                                           DSI Faculty Director of AI).

Aditya Nandy

Aditya Nandy has begun his new role as Assistant Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at UCLA. Aditya researches the inner ear proteins that make it possible for mammals to hear across frequency ranges. During his fellowship, Aditya explored applications of nonequilibrium statistical mechanics and AI/ML to biophysical systems. You can find Aditya’s publications here.

Fellowship Mentors: Benoit Roux (Amgen Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and Professor of Neuroscience) and Suri Vaikuntanakan (Professor of Chemistry).

Ludwig Schneider

Ludwig Schneider has begun a new role as a Senior HPC Performance Engineer on  NVIDIA’s GPU Communications Team, optimizing communication and its patterns to enable scaling to larger models. As a Schmidt AI in Science Fellow, Ludwig worked to develop an in silico workflow enabling the design of sustainable polymeric materials. You can find Ludwig’s publications here.

Fellowship Mentors: Risi Kondor (Assoc. Professor of Computer Science and Statistics; Faculty Co-Director, AI+Science) and Juan de Pablo (Executive Dean, NYU Tandon School of Engineering).

Shailaja Seetharaman

Shailaja Seetharaman has accepted a role as Assistant Professor in the Mechanobiology Institute and the Department of Physiology at the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine at National University of Singapore. As a Schmidt AI in Science Fellow, Shailaja, a mechanobiologist specializing in vascular dysfunction, leveraged novel AI and ML approaches to understand and predict cell and tissue-level function in healthy versus disease states. Such research offers the potential to inform development of novel mechano-chemical therapies for vascular dysfunction and other health issues. You can read Shailaja’s publications here.

                                                           Fellowship Mentor: Margaret Gardel (Horace B. Horton Professor of Physics and                                                                       Molecular Engineering).

Colm Talbot

Colm Talbot has accepted a role as a Senior Software and Programming Analyst at Princeton University, across the Physics Department and Central University Research Computing. Colm’s work focuses on developing methods to apply computational Bayesian inference to the astrophysics of massive stars. You can learn more about his research at his website.

Fellowship Mentors: Daniel Holz (Professor in the Departments of Physics, Astronomy & Astrophysics, the Enrico Fermi Institute, and the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics) and Frederic Koehler (Asst. Professor of Statistics and Data Science).

Madeleine Torcasso

Madeleine Torcasso has joined the faculty at UChicago as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine, within the Section of Hematology. Madeleine develops and implements AI methods to automatically find and characterize cells in high-content microscopy images and extract spatial features of cellular organization that may be linked with therapeutic response or prognosis. You can learn more about Madeleine’s research here and find her publications here.

Fellowship Mentor:  Maryellen Giger (A.N. Pritzker Professor of Radiology, Committee on Medical Physics, and the College).

Yihang Wang

Yihang Wang has joined the faculty of Case Western Reserve University as an Assistant Professor of Chemistry. Yihang’s work combines artificial intelligence with statistical mechanics to simulate biological systems at the molecular level, even in cases of rare conditions. Read Yihang’s publications here.

Fellowship Mentor:  Gregory Voth (Haig P. Papazian Distinguished Service Professor of Chemistry).

Learn more about the Eric and Wendy Schmidt AI in Science Fellowship here. 

Congratulations again as you continue your research journeys. We look forward to seeing what you discover next.