Group Members


Join Us
<a href=Marinka Zitnik" />

Marinka Zitnik

Associate Professor

<a href=Walker Rickord " />

Walker Rickord

PhD Student
Harvard-MIT HST

<a href=Kevin Li" />

Kevin Li

PhD Student
Harvard-MIT HST

<a href=Shvat Messica" />

Shvat Messica

PhD Student
Harvard AIM

<a href=Ada Fang" />

Ada Fang

PhD Student
Harvard CCB

<a href=Yepeng Huang" />

Yepeng Huang

PhD Student
Harvard BBS

<a href=Robert Calef" />

Robert Calef

PhD Student
MIT EECS

<a href=Michael Sun" />

Michael Sun

PhD Student
MIT EECS

<a href=Lukas Fesser" />

Lukas Fesser

PhD Student
Harvard Applied Mathematics

<a href=Nic Fishman" />

Nic Fishman

PhD Student
Harvard Statistics

<a href=Ayush Noori" />

Ayush Noori

PhD Student
Oxford University

<a href=Valentina Giunchiglia" />

Valentina Giunchiglia

PhD Student
Imperial College London

<a href=Zhenglun Kong" />

Zhenglun Kong

Postdoctoral Fellow

<a href=Boyang Fu" />

Boyang Fu

Postdoctoral Fellow

<a href=Grey Kuling" />

Grey Kuling

Postdoctoral Fellow
Curriculum Fellow

<a href=Intae Moon" />

Intae Moon

Postdoctoral Fellow

<a href=Michelle M. Li" />

Michelle M. Li

Postdoctoral Fellow
Harvard Berkowitz Fellow

<a href=Ruth Johnson" />

Ruth Johnson

Postdoctoral Fellow
Harvard Berkowitz Fellow

<a href=Shanghua Gao" />

Shanghua Gao

Postdoctoral Fellow

<a href=Xiang Lin" />

Xiang Lin

Postdoctoral Fellow

<a href=Xiaorui Su" />

Xiaorui Su

Postdoctoral Fellow

<a href=Aarthi Venkat" />

Aarthi Venkat

Postdoctoral Fellow
Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow

<a href=Reza Shamji" />

Reza Shamji

Research Associate

<a href=Lucas Vittor" />

Lucas Vittor

Research Associate

<a href=Michelle Dai" />

Michelle Dai

Research Associate

<a href=Pengwei Sui" />

Pengwei Sui

Research Associate

<a href=Leo Cui" />

Leo Cui

Researcher
Harvard

<a href=Richard Zhu" />

Richard Zhu

Undergraduate Researcher
Harvard

<a href=Iñaki Arango" />

Iñaki Arango

Undergraduate Researcher
Harvard

<a href=Amy Dong" />

Amy Dong

Undergraduate Researcher
Harvard

<a href=Joaquín Polonuer" />

Joaquín Polonuer

Visiting Student

<a href=Jiawen Zhang" />

Jiawen Zhang

Visiting PhD Student

<a href=Kexin Chen" />

Kexin Chen

Visiting PhD Student

Lab alumni

2025:
  • Wanxiang Shen (Postdoctoral Fellow → Assistant Professor, Zhejiang University)
  • Ying Yin (Harvard Data Science Postdoctoral Fellow → Assistant Professor, University of Pennsylvania)
  • Andrew Shen (Associate → Biomedical Data Science PhD Student, Stanford University)
  • Yasha Ektefaie (PhD Student → Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow, Broad Institute)
2024:
  • Zaixi Zhang (Visiting PhD Student → Postdoctoral Fellow, Princeton University)
  • Owen Queen (Associate → Computer Science PhD Student, Stanford University)
  • Varun Ullanat (Associate → Computer Science PhD Student, MIT)
  • Ivy Liang (Harvard College)
  • Tianlong Chen (Postdoctoral Fellow → Assistant Professor, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
2023:
  • Guadalupe Gonzalez (Visiting PhD Student → Research Scientist, Prescient Design, Genentech, Roche)
  • Tom Cobley (Undergraduate Researcher → Machine Learning Engineer, Google DeepMind)
  • Ziyuan Zhao (Undergraduate Researcher → Systems Biology PhD Student, Harvard Medical School)
  • Nicholas Ho (Undergraduate Researcher → Computer Science PhD Student, Carnegie Mellon University)
  • Yepeng Huang (Graduate Researcher at Harvard Chan → Biological and Medical Sciences PhD Student, Harvard Medical School)
  • Marissa Sumathipala (Undergraduate Researcher at Harvard College; Gates Cambridge Scholarship; Churchill Scholarship; Cambridge University → Neuroscience PhD Student, Harvard University)
  • Julia Balla (Undergraduate Researcher at MIT → Computer Science PhD Student, MIT)
  • Jiali Cheng (Undergraduate Researcher → Computer Science PhD Student, UMass Lowell)
  • Isuru Herath (Undergraduate Researcher → Data Scientist, Merck)
  • Jean-Guillaume Brasier (Harvard IACS Graduate Student → Data Scientist, Moderna)
2022:
  • Marie Zhang (HMS)
  • Man Qing Liang (HMS → Data Scientist, Dandelion)
  • Payal Chandak (Undergraduate Researcher → Harvard-MIT HST PhD Student, Harvard University & MIT)
  • Xiang Zhang (Postdoctoral Fellow → Assistant Professor, UNC Charlotte)
  • Chirag Agarwal (Postdoctoral Fellow, HMS → Assistant Professor, University of Virginia)
  • Josh Pan (Postdoctoral Fellow, Broad Institute → Research Scientist, DeepMind)
  • Michelle Lu (Harvard College)
  • Raunak Chowdhuri (MIT)
  • Marie Zhang (HMS)
  • Satvik Tripathi (Undergraduate Researcher, Drexel University)
  • Varun Tekur (Undergraduate Researcher → Systems Biology PhD Student, Columbia University)
  • Lydia Fozo (Undergraduate Researcher, Johns Hopkins University)
2021:
  • Kexin Huang (Harvard Chan → Computer Science PhD Student, Stanford University)
  • Haoxin Li (Harvard Chan)
  • Yucong Lin (Harvard Chan → Beijing Institute of Technology)
  • Mert Erden (Tufts University)
  • Jingyi Liu (HMS)
2020:
  • Yujie Shao (HMS)
  • Stone Chen (HMS)
  • Kathleen Sucipto (HMS)
  • Min Jean Cho (Undergraduate Researcher, Brown University)

Latest News

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.

Dec 2025:   AI For Science at NeurIPS

Join us and hundreds of other scientists at the 6th AI for Science workshop at NeurIPS.

Nov 2025:   Protein Structure Tokenization

Nov 2025:   Generative AI Model for Spatial Biology

Nov 2025:   AI Cell Models

A piece in Science explores how AI cell models could transform biomedicine (if they work as promised) and highlights ToolUniverse. ToolUniverse lets AI co-scientists test, analyze, and build on AI cell models.

Oct 2025:   Is AI sycophancy holding science back?

A piece in Nature explores how AI sycophancy, in which models agree too much with users instead of reasoning on its own, could affect the use of AI in medical research.

Oct 2025:   Our research featured by Kempner and Crimson

A news story about PDGrapher in Harvard Crimson. ToolUniverse featured on the Kempner Institute blog.

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