Back to Departmental Colloquium: Fall 2025
Departmental Colloquium
Date: Wednesday, Sep 10, 2025
Time: 4:00PM - 5:00PM
Location: ASB 210
Note special day
Berton Earnshaw
University of Utah and Recursion
Title |
Virtual Cells in the era of AI |
Abstract |
Creating virtual cells has long been a goal of the computational research community that unfortunately remains unachieved given the daunting complexity and scale of cellular biology. Nevertheless, recent advances in AI, computing power, lab automation, and high-throughput cellular profiling provide new opportunities for reaching this goal. I will briefly review the current state of AI-powered virtual cells, then present a vision for developing and evaluating virtual cells that leverages these advances. I will argue that, in order to be a useful tool to discover novel biology, virtual cells must accurately predict the functional response of a cell to perturbative interventions and explain how the predicted response is a consequence of modifications to key biomolecular interactions. I will compare and contrast with traditional mechanistic modeling approaches, and highlight potential research directions aimed at bringing the benefits of these approaches closer together. |
Applied Mathematics
Data Science and Machine Learning
Mathematical Biology