The 90th Cold Spring Harbor Symposium addressed AI in Biology. The goal of the Cold Spring Harbor Symposium is to capture the current state of a field at a time when that field is undergoing transformative change through new discoveries, integrating novel ideas and approaches into existing knowledge. Nowhere is that clearer than in our current times, when AI is revolutionizing so many disciplines, not least the life sciences.
The Symposium Archive includes over 20 hours of video of invited talks and discussion across nine oral sessions, providing a current synthesis of the enormous impact that AI is having and will have on the life sciences.
Archived Sessions, Speakers & Titles
FIRST NIGHT INTRODUCTORY SESSION
Bruce Stillman & David Stewart - Introduction
Jennifer Doudna - Design of functional unnatural RNA-guided nucleases (30' + Q&A)
Alexander Rives - Language modeling materializes a world model of protein biology (30' + Q&A)
Pushmeet Kohli - Leveraging AI to advance biology (30' + Q&A)
Hoifung Poon - Towards virtual patient—AI for accelerating medical discovery (30' + Q&A)
AI AND REGULATORY GENOMICS
Ziga Avsec - Advancing regulatory variant effect prediction with AlphaGenome (20' + Q&A)
Anshul Kundaje - Decoding regulatory DNA with deep learning models (20' + Q&A)
David Kelley - Borzoi—A sequence-to-expression model for gene regulation and genetic variant interpretation (20' + Q&A)
Stein Aerts - Modeling genome regulation using single-cell atlases (20' + Q&A)
Jian Zhou - From predictive to mechanistic models of regulatory DNA sequence (20' + Q&A)
Peter Koo - Improving genomic deep learning with perturbation data (20' + Q&A)
Stephen Quake - Understanding the mysteries of the cell—How do many cell types arise from one genome? (20' + Q&A)
AI AND EVOLUTION
Yun Song - Learning from evolutionary trajectories to predict variant effects and generate realistic biomolecules (20' + Q&A)
Bernardo de Almeida - A foundational model for joint sequence-function multi-species modeling at scale for long range genomic prediction (20' + Q&A)
Edward Buckler - Using artificial intelligence to learn across flowering plant genomes (20' + Q&A)
Yunha Hwang - Linear-time prediction of proteome-scale microbial protein interactions (20' + Q&A)
Martin Steinegger - Exploring the protein universe, from structural motifs to proteome-scale complexes (20' + Q&A)
Debora Marks - AI methods to solve protein engineering and human genetics (20' + Q&A)
AI AND CELLS & TISSUES
Fabian Theis - From measurement to intervention—Closing the loop in single-cell perturbation biology (20' + Q&A)
Kyle Farh - A quick progress update on the 1 billion cell atlas—Findings from the first 300 million cells of genome-wide perturb-seq (20' + Q&A)
Jian Ma - AI for cellular organization and function across scales (20' + Q&A)
David Van Valen - Acceleration biological discovery with AI enabled measurements (20' + Q&A)
Elham Azizi - Generative AI models of cellular dynamics in the tumor microenvironment (20' + Q&A)
Jacob Kimmel - In silico design of epigenetic reprogramming payloads (20' + Q&A)
Emma Lundberg - Decoding human cell architecture – from spatial proteomics to cell modeling (20' + Q&A)
AI AND CLINICAL TRANSLATION & PRECISION ONCOLOGY
Daniel Bear - Solving clinical translation with foundation models of human biology (20' + Q&A)
Charlotte Bunne - Virtual patient labs—AI-driven simulation and diagnostics for precision oncology (20' + Q&A)
Faisal Mahmood - Multimodal, generative, and agentic AI for pathology (20' + Q&A)
Ewan Birney - Genomics, imaging and AI—Three technologies which are changing our understanding of living systems (20' + Q&A)
NEURO AI, PART 1
Anthony Zador - What can neuroscience still teach AI? (20' + Q&A)
Terrence Sejnowski - Brains and AI (20' + Q&A)
Daniel Yamins - A fruitful reciprocity; the past, present, and future of NeuroAI (20' + Q&A)
Surya Ganguli - From explainable AI to conceptual understanding in neuroscience (20' + Q&A)
Mackenzie Mathis - Measuring and modeling behavior with AI (20' + Q&A)
Dmitri Chklovskii - Toward biologically inspired AI—Predicting and controlling a dynamical world (20' + Q&A)
DORCAS CUMMINGS LECTURE
Ewan Birney - Human Biology in the era of AI (40' + Q&A)
SCIENTIFIIC AGENTS AND MULTIMODAL MODELS
Marinka Zitnik - Collaborative AI agents for biology (20' + Q&A)
Maria Brbic - Many views, one cell—Multimodal models for decoding cellular complexity (20' + Q&A)
Caroline Uhler - Integrating multimodal data—From biomarkers to mechanisms (20' + Q&A)
Eric Xing - A world model of the virtual cell (20' + Q&A)
AI AND PROTEINS
Mohammed AlQuraishi - Some observations on how AlphaFold predicts structures and how it learns to predict structure (20' + Q&A)
Andrea Pauli - Life' + Q&As first kiss—New insights into the mechanism of fertilization (20' + Q&A)
Ben Lehner - Mutate everything—Mapping the energetic and allosteric landscapes of proteins at scale (20' + Q&A)
Johannes Walter - Proteome-wide in silico screening for human protein-protein interactions (20' + Q&A)
Michael Bronstein - Black box data in the AI era (20' + Q&A)
Ellen Zhong - Algorithms for biomolecular structure determination at the proteome scale (20' + Q&A)
Fan Liu - Building structural interactomics by cross-linking mass spectrometry (20' + Q&A)
NEURO AI, PART 2
Alexei Koulakov - Grounding olfactory perception in language—Benchmarks and models for generating natural language odor descriptions (20' + Q&A)
Eva Dyer - Multimodal foundation models for neural data (20' + Q&A)
Andreas Tolias - Foundation models of the brain (20' + Q&A)
Francisco Martín-Zamora - PARTHENON—Virtual cell models for causal discovery in Alzheimer' + Q&As disease (20' + Q&A)
AMAZON BIO DISCOVERY PLATFORM WORKSHOP
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The Symposium Archive includes access to the recorded oral sessions and invited speaker abstracts on CSHL's Leading Strand meeting archive.
Symposium Archive Access Fees (through August 14, 2026)
Academic Rate: $295
Corporate Rate: $500
The Symposium Archive Access will end August 14, 2026 at 11.59pm ET