About

The biomedical sciences are uniquely suited not only to being one of the greatest beneficiaries of research in machine learning — but also one of the greatest sources of inspiration for foundational developments in it.

Mission

The Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center is creating a global community of researchers who develop the foundations of machine learning to enable us to understand the programs of life and how they connect across scales, from proteins to genes to organisms.

We seek to achieve our mission through three key activities:

  1. Bringing together a wide range of researchers across the Broad Institute, MIT, and Harvard to identify key biological and computational challenges, and support flagship scientific projects.

  2. Developing theoretical, computational, and algorithmic paradigms and generating new experimental datasets to elucidate the programs of life, and sharing them with the world.

  3. Developing a global community at the interface of machine learning and biology and training the next generation of leaders in machine learning, statistics, and applied mathematics who drive biological discovery.

We want our efforts not only to be judged on our ability to bring data technologies to bear on biological discovery, but also on our ability to make biology a key driver of foundational advances in machine learning.

Research

We are advancing the foundations of machine learning to answer fundamental biomedical questions.

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Eric & Wendy Schmidt

Through a $150 million endowment gift in 2021, philanthropists Eric and Wendy Schmidt funded the Center to create a new field of interdisciplinary research aimed at improving human health. Eric is chair of the Broad Institute Board, and Wendy is president of Schmidt Family Foundation and Schmidt Ocean Institute. The couple also founded Schmidt Futures.

Diversity & Inclusion

We strive to create a research community that welcomes people from all backgrounds — particularly those from communities that have been historically underrepresented in STEM. To that end, we are partnering with the Broad on strategies to ensure that our fellowship program works toward the institute’s goal of developing a diverse new generation of researchers.

We are deeply invested in ensuring that our commitment to the highest level of ethics and equity is brought to bear through each project. Towards that goal, we work with researchers focused on engaging underrepresented groups, anticipating outcomes for vulnerable populations, and developing open-source tools that will maximize benefit to all.

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