Artificial Intelligence for Medicine and Science


Open Positions

Machine Learning Foundations and Biomedical Discovery

Our overarching goal is to establish the foundations of AI for science and medicine through systems that generate new biological insight and are capable of accelerating the discovery, design, and development of treatments for the most pressing medical challenges of our time.

We develop artificial intelligence and machine learning models, with emphasis on systems that are grounded in knowledge. Our work includes multimodal, generative and agentic AI models trained that can reason and empower scientific discovery across molecular, cellular, tissue, and patient scales.

AI for Science | Scientific Discovery and Therapeutic Science

Science is entering a new era in which AI can do more than analyze data: it can help generate hypotheses, connect disparate evidence, guide experiments, and accelerate discovery. Biological systems are deeply interconnected across scales, from genes and proteins to cells, tissues, and whole organisms. Our research develops AI methods that learn across these levels of organization to uncover biological principles, model disease mechanisms, and advance the design of therapeutics and other interventions.

AI for Medicine | Individualized Diagnosis and Treatment

Human health can now be measured with unprecedented precision through genomic data, cellular atlases, molecular profiles, clinical records, imaging, and treatment histories. The central challenge is to integrate and reason over these heterogeneous data to support diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment selection. Our research builds AI systems that combine patient data with biomedical knowledge to enable more precise, evidence-based, and individualized medicine, with the goal of matching each patient to the right treatment and improving consistency between clinical outcomes and biological insight.

Latest News

Apr 2026:   OptimusKG: A Modern Knowledge Graph

OptimusKG brings biomedical knowledge into a modern multimodal knowledge graph. It supports graph AI, knowledge-grounded retrieval with large language models, and discovery workflows that generate and evaluate biomedical hypotheses.

Apr 2026:   ARK Accepted at ACL 2026

Mar 2026:   Open 'AI Scientists' Initiative

Excited to launch Open AI Scientists, our initiative to empower scientific discovery with AI scientists. [https://www.openscientist.ai]

Mar 2026:   Generalist Biological AI in Nature Biotechnology

Mar 2026:   Claw Institute

Claw Institute is a research exchange for AI scientists. It gives agents a shared space to publish ideas, challenge claims, use scientific tools, and build on one another’s work. These early interactions point to a new mode of discovery in which societies of AI scientists participate in discovery loops alongside human researchers.

Feb 2026:   Overton Prize

Our research has been recognized with the 2026 Overton Prize.

Feb 2026:   Foundation Models that Can 'Act or Defer'

Feb 2026:   Reasoning Model for Longitudinal Data

Feb 2026:   Context Switching AI in Nature Medicine

Jan 2026:   Zoom-Out and Zoom-In Retrieval for LLMs

Much of the world’s knowledge lies outside public web text accessible to LLMs, including internal ontologies, curated catalogs, drug safety tables, patient health data, and lab knowledge bases. ARK helps an LLM to choose, one step at a time, whether to look broadly for relevant information or to dig deeper by following specific links in the data.

Jan 2026:   AI Scientist for Therapeutic Discovery

Jan 2026:   AI Scientists - LLMs Using Scientific Tools

Excited about this academic collaboration with Anthropic on adding connectors to ToolUniverse to make Claude even more powerful for scientific discovery.

Dec 2025:   AI + Validation in Molecular, Organoid, and Clinical Systems

Dec 2025:   Digital Twinning

A piece in Harvard Gazette on digital twins, cellular chatbots, and building digital twins at a cellular scale.

Dec 2025:   Virtual Cells and Instruments

We are excited to meet hundreds of researchers attending our AI Virtual Cells and Instruments: A New Era in Drug Discovery and Development workshop at NeurIPS 2025.

Dec 2025:   CUREBench

Excited to see 1,622 researchers from around the world entering our CUREBench Challenge with 398 participating teams that made 3,383 submissions to the competition and submitted 8,457,500+ AI reasoning traces for therapeutics. Join us at the Award Ceremony at NeurIPS.

Zitnik Lab  ·  Artificial Intelligence in Medicine and Science  ·  Harvard  ·  Department of Biomedical Informatics