March 12, 2024
DBDS Communications
A new $5 million grant from the Warren Alpert Foundation was recently awarded to the Department of Biomedical Data Science (DBDS) at the Stanford School of Medicine. The grant will fund the training of 15 graduate scholars over the next five years to enhance the education and retention of scholars in computational biology/artificial intelligence (CBAI).
“We are living in unprecedented times, with the explosion of AI and computational innovation,” said DBDS Chair Sylvia Plevritis, who will also serve as the principal investigator for the grant. “The Stanford AI landscape is fueling discovery and precision health — the Warren Albert CBAI Scholars trainees have an amazing opportunity to help drive this revolution.”
The grant is part of the Warren Alpert Foundation’s aim to increase the number of scholars in CBAI and alleviate the current shortage of highly-trained individuals in this field. Professionals with computational biology and artificial intelligence training backgrounds are currently in great demand to leverage the latest AI technologies and datasets and uncover new insights that can lead to improved treatments of diseases.
The grant will allocate funding for mentorships and connections to a community of professionals in the discipline. Within the 15 Warren Alpert CBAI Scholars, DBDS will train five MS, five PhD and five post-doctoral students by implementing specific CBAI coursework, focusing on training students in both AI-driven data science and cellular/molecular human biology. DBDS will launch a CBAI Center of Excellence to bring the Warren Alpert Scholars, faculty, and external partners together on a regular basis. DBDS will also establish an annual CBAI Symposium to present advancements in drug discovery and computational biology.
The core faculty for the Warren Alpert CBAI Scholars program will consist of DBDS researchers and professors who have well-established and renown research histories in the field. Along with the Principal Investigator Plevritis, Co-Principal Investigators are Professor Barbara Engelhardt and Professor Olivier Gevaert.
The focus of the grant aligns with DBDS’ vision, for example, with Plevritis’ research in AI-guided, multimodal spatial biology to reconstruct dynamic cancer tissue microenvironments of tumor, immune, and stromal cells and Professor Manuel Rivas’ research, which develops statistical models and computational tools for population-scale studies using genomic and phenotype data.
“This Warren Alpert Grant will grow and consolidate computational biology on Stanford’s campus through the researchers closest to the work: Students and postdocs,” Engelhardt said. “With world-class technology development, biomedical research, statistics, and machine learning, Stanford is now poised to become the place to work on computational biology.”
Gevaert also shared his enthusiasm about the promise of expanding the graduate program to include the Warren Alpert CBAI Scholars.
“I’m thrilled that Warren Alpert is providing the resources to train more master, PhD students and postdocs in biomedical data science and in particular at the intersection of computational biology and AI,” Gevaert added. “This will enable our graduate program to grow significantly and provide more students with the opportunity to become future leaders in this exciting field.”
The first cohort of Warren Alpert CBAI Scholars will begin training in fall 2024 and will join the existing Biomedical Data Science graduate training program in the department, which has been a leader in educating students in biomedical data science and bioinformatics for more than 40 years.