The Francis Crick Institute has appointed Professor Mihaela van der Schaar as its Chief AI Scientist, advancing its ambition to combine artificial intelligence with fundamental biology and medicine, creating new approaches to scientific discovery.
Mihaela van der Schaar
Mihaela is an internationally leading researcher in machine learning and AI and will take on the role alongside her academic work at the University of Cambridge, where she is the John Humphrey Plummer Professor of Machine Learning, AI and Medicine, and Director of the Cambridge Centre for AI in Medicine.
She will work with scientists at the institute, including researchers from its university partners, to explore how new approaches in AI can deepen biological understanding, from generating hypotheses to designing experiments and uncovering mechanisms of disease.
Mihaela’s role will be key to the Crick’s strategic development, shaping how the institute becomes a leader in AI-enabled biomedical science and championing the role of AI in more ambitious, exploratory and imaginative science.
AI is already widely used in biomedical research - from modelling complex biological pathways to screening potential drug compounds against new genetic targets - and it is also a valuable automation tool. This next phase of AI at the Crick is not simply about supporting existing workflows, but about helping scientists think differently.
Mihaela will support Crick scientists to expand the scale and scope of their research, and explore how AI can reason across experiments, data, literature and biological mechanisms, generate and test hypotheses, and help them ask better questions.
As Mihaela explains: “The next generation of AI should not simply assist scientists at the margins. It should help us rethink the scientific method for an era in which human insight and machine intelligence can work together in fundamentally new ways. This is also about allowing the hardest questions in biology and medicine to inspire the next generation of AI.”
“I am incredibly excited by the opportunity to work with Crick scientists to explore what becomes possible when depth of biological insight is combined with the most powerful new ideas in artificial intelligence.”
Edith Heard, Director and CEO of the Crick, said: “AI is opening new ways of understanding biology that were not previously accessible, helping us ask different kinds of scientific questions. This is especially important in life sciences, where the systems we seek to understand are complex and dynamic.”
“Working with Mihaela gives us the exciting opportunity to integrate AI more deeply into discovery at the Crick, expanding the scale at which we can explore ideas, test hypotheses and design experiments. She brings a distinctive perspective on how AI can work alongside scientists to navigate complex biological systems in more creative ways.”
