October 26, 2022
A new University of Chicago initiative, the Eric and Wendy Schmidt AI in Science Postdoctoral Fellowship, a program of Schmidt Futures, will train the next generation of scientists combining research in both AI and science fields, including physics, astronomy and biology.
The UChicago fellowship, part of a $148 million initiative announced today, will launch in January 2023 with its first cohort of postdoctoral researchers. Over the next five years, the fellowship will fund more than 50 early-career researchers working at the intersection of AI and science and engineering at UChicago and its affiliated laboratories.
“There’s a recognition that artificial intelligence and machine learning have the potential to be transformative in basic research in the sciences,” said Professor Joshua Frieman, chair of the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, and faculty co-lead of the new fellowship program. “We’re now entering a qualitatively new era where it’s just exploding, and it’s clear that it’s going to have vast implications. We would like to accelerate the incorporation of AI and machine learning into basic research and thereby transform how we do research and what kinds of questions we can ask.”