Our congratulations to Ludwig Princeton’s Michael Skinnider, who was named a Pew Scholar in mid-June. He is one of 21 scientists selected for the organization’s Program in the Biomedical Sciences. Aside from recognizing the scientific capabilities and contributions of early-career researchers, the prestigious award provides each scholar with $300,000 in flexible funding over the next four years for their studies. The funds will support Mike’s ongoing efforts to enlist AI in his exploration of the so-called “dark matter” of the metabolome—the profusion of largely unidentified small molecules that are generated by our cells and commensal microbes or enter our bodies from the outer environment and play a significant yet poorly understood role in health and disease. Earlier this year, Mike reported his group’s development of DeepMet, a chemical language model that learns from the structures of known metabolites to anticipate the existence of previously unrecognized ones. The group demonstrated that its integration with mass spectrometry-based metabolomics data facilitates metabolite discovery, applying DeepMet to describe several dozen new and structurally diverse mammalian metabolites. Mike will use Pew support to introduce an entirely new AI framework for the acquisition and analysis of mass spectrometry data and explore how genetic variation influences the spectrum of metabolites, work that should identify new metabolic pathways and mechanisms of disease.
Back to September 2026 Ludwig Link