Eight Scientists Named 2025 Schmidt Polymaths to Pursue Research in New Disciplines

A global cohort of eight scientists and engineers working in a variety of disciplines were named Schmidt Polymaths and will each receive up to $2.5 million over five years to pursue research in new disciplines or using new methodologies, Schmidt Sciences announced.

As Schmidt Polymaths, the researchers pursue new approaches compared to previous work. The new cohort of polymaths will answer questions like how to expand access to healthcare with low-cost technologies, what happens to our chromosomes when we age and how to create more accurate computer simulations of climate.

The eight selected scientists represent the fifth cohort of the highly selective Schmidt Polymaths program. Awardees must have been tenured—or achieved similar status—within the previous three years. Previous cohorts have used the award to design new sensor devices, perform experiments at atomic resolutions, analyze trees of life with faster and more efficient algorithms, discover new mathematical formulas assisted by AI, and more.

Drawn from universities worldwide and selected through a competitive application process, Schmidt Polymaths are required to demonstrate past ability and future potential to pursue early-stage, novel research that would otherwise be challenging to fund—even with the current declines in U.S. science funding.

The 2025 Schmidt Polymaths are:

• Angela Wu, Associate Professor, Division of Life Science and the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Dr. Wu will explore engineering approaches to create a fully human, functional in-vitro brain organoid that could one day be used for therapeutic transplantation.
• Arvind Murugan, Associate Professor of Physics, University of Chicago. Dr. Murugan will use experiments to explore how molecules can learn and compute by doing what comes naturally, revealing how evolution and synthetic biology can harness hidden powers in the physics of matter without micromanaging every detail.
• Damián Blasi, Research Professor at Catalan Institution for Research andAdvanced Study, Pompeu Fabra University. Dr. Blasi will bridge human cultural and linguistic diversity research with AI by investigating human problem-solving strategies and exploring the downstream impacts of linguistic diversity on AI Foundation Models.
• Justin Solomon, Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Solomon will explore problems in acoustics, climate, and other fields that require digital simulation of physical phenomena. 
• Nozomi Ando, Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Cornell University. Dr. Ando will explore the co-evolution of life and the planet by combining geology, evolutionary biology, and biochemistry.
• Polly Fordyce, Associate Professor of Bioengineering and Genetics and Institute, Scholar of ChEM-H, Stanford University. Dr. Fordyce will work toward enabling crowd-sourced, megascale measurements of protein function, which will yield critical data required to drive revolutionary advances in functional protein design.
• Saad Bhamla, Associate Professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology. Dr. Bhamla will develop low-cost technologies to tackle planetary-scale challenges, including AI-enabled point-of-care diagnostics in low-resource environments. They will also engineer autonomous morphing machines that adapt, evolve and learn like living systems.
• Uri Ben-David, Professor of Cancer Genetics at the Faculty of Medicine, Tel Aviv University. Dr. Ben-David will study human aging through the lens of chromosomes, in an attempt to uncover the chromosomal basis of cellular decline.