Ludwig Princeton’s Michael Skinnider was chosen as a 2025 Packard Fellow for Science and Engineering in October. The Packard Fellowships honor researchers the David and Lucile Packard Foundation considers “the nation’s most promising early-career scientists and engineers.” This year’s cohort includes 20 such researchers, who will each receive $875,000 over five years to support their studies. The Foundation has awarded more than half a billion dollars to 735 scientists and engineers from 55 universities since the Fellowships were launched in 1988. Mike will apply the flexible funding he gets from the Foundation to support his ongoing efforts to chart the vast and extremely underexplored universe of small molecule metabolites in the body, many of which are likely to play an important role in physiology and disease. The challenge here has more to do with analysis than the availability of experimental tools: mass spectrometry-based metabolomics generates copious data on the small molecules teeming in any given bodily sample, but defining their structures at a reasonable pace and scale remains a problem of staggering complexity. Mike integrates artificial intelligence with biochemical analysis to address that problem and has already shown, in a paper recently published in Nature, how large language models can be powerful allies in the effort.
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