On October 1st, 2026, Schmidt Sciences – a philanthropic organization based in the USA – announced that Alex Tong, Principal Investigator at AITHYRA, was awarded an AI2050 Early Career Fellowship worth USD 450,000. In his three-year project titled “Likelihood-Guided Molecular Engineering: From Snapshots to Ensembles”, Alex Tong and his group will explore how shifting from sample-quality-optimized AI models to frameworks with computationally tractable, exact likelihoods will bridge the gap between generative AI and physics.
Rather than relying on frameworks that regurgitate patterns from training data, Alex Tong’s new project will develop AI models “that know what they know”. First, the model will provide precise control over the generation process, allowing to reliably perform conditional design. Second, instead of generating static snapshots of molecules, the model will explicitly take the distribution of states into account, opening up a new avenue of design.
Alex Tong comments: “When AI can reliably design molecules, molecular biology will transition from a slow, experimental science reliant on guesswork and luck into a predictable, rapid engineering discipline. As a consequence, the time from identifying a novel disease target to deploying a personalized functional therapeutic will be measured in days, not decades. This is what we are aiming for.”
Congratulations to Alex Tong! All the best to you and your team for achieving the scientific objectives you are heading for!
Schmidt Sciences is a charitable, US-based organization that finds and connects talented people across fields, generations, and geographies to harness their collective skills for public benefit.
The AI2050 Early Career Fellowship was designed by Schmidt Science as an enabling fellowship to encourage postdoctoral and pre-tenure researchers to pursue bold and ambitious work on hard problems in AI. According to Schmidt Science, each year, approximately 15-20 early career researchers around the world are selected through a rigorous process. The breadth of the fellows’ projects showcases the range of work that Schmidt Science considers to be critical to answer the AI2050 motivating question, which reads as follows: “It’s 2050. AI has turned out to be hugely beneficial to society. What happened? What are the most important problems we solved and the opportunities and possibilities we realized to ensure this outcome?”
AI2050 Webpage: https://ai2050.schmidtsciences.org/
Press release Schmidt Sciences: https://www.schmidtsciences.org/ai2050-fellows-2026-announcement/
