LIDS Webinar: AI Agents to Accelerate Biomedical Discoveries

When:  Mar 4, 2026 from 12:00 to 14:00 (ET)

Speaker: James Zou, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Biomedical Data Science, CS and EE at Stanford University

Timing: Wednesday, March 4 from 12:00pm - 2:00pm ET

Format: Online (Via Zoom)

Description: AI agents—large language models equipped with tools and reasoning capabilities—are emerging as powerful research enablers. This talk will explore how agentic AI can accelerate 1 scientific discoveries. I’ll first introduce the Virtual Lab—a collaborative team of AI scientist agents conducting in silico research meetings to tackle open-ended research projects. As an example application, the Virtual Lab designed new nanobody binders to recent Covid variants that we experimentally validated. Then I will introduce Paper2Agent, a framework to automatically convert passive research papers into interactive AI agents.

James Zou is an associate professor of Biomedical Data Science, CS and EE at Stanford University. He works on developing cutting-edge AI for biomedical applications. His group developed many widely used innovations including EchoNet AI (FDA cleared for assessing cardiac function), Gradio (used by over a million developers), and SyntheMol (NY Times 2024 Good Tech). He has received the Overton Prize, Sloan Fellowship, NSF CAREER Award, two ChanZuckerberg Investigator Awards, a Top Ten Clinical Achievement Award, best paper awards at ICML and other AI conferences, and faculty awards from Google, Amazon, Adobe and Apple.

Location

Online