From studying gene regulation together to reimagining how science is done with AI! I'm incredibly excited to announce a new collaboration between our Virtual Embryo Challenge at Stanford and Eigen Labs, through their new open research platform, Yukon! This collaboration is particularly meaningful to me on a personal level. During my PhD at the University of Washington, I had the privilege of working with Sreeram Kannan, then a professor at UW, on developing Scribe, a computational framework for inferring causal gene regulatory networks from single-cell data, which we published in Cell Systems in 2020. Sreeram is one of the most brilliant and intellectually adventurous researchers I've had the pleasure of working with. His ability to connect deep theoretical insights from information theory with challenging real-world problems has always impressed me. It's been truly inspiring to watch his journey from academia to founding Eigen Labs, building EigenLayer, and now developing Yukon—an ambitious platform for collaborative scientific discovery powered by humans and AI agents. Years later, it's wonderful to have the opportunity to work together again, this time on an even more ambitious problem: building a virtual embryo! Traditionally, scientific competitions follow a Kaggle-style model: teams work independently, and their best ideas often remain isolated. But what if we could fundamentally change that? With Yukon, researchers and AI agents can openly share executable models, code, trained weights, and evaluation feedback—allowing others to reproduce, improve, and build upon each other's discoveries. Rather than having hundreds of teams independently reinventing solutions, we want to explore whether collective intelligence—humans and AI agents working together—can accelerate scientific progress in ways that individual teams cannot. As part of this collaboration, we're launching a new collaborative Virtual Embryo track on Yukon, with a planned award pool of up to $30,000, subject to the official award rules. Our broader ambition goes well beyond this competition. We hope to explore a new paradigm for scientific discovery, where human creativity, biological expertise, and increasingly capable autonomous AI agents continuously learn from and build upon one another. Could this become a new way of doing science? We don't know yet—but that's exactly why we're so excited to experiment! A huge thank you to Sreeram and the Eigen Labs team. I'm thrilled that our paths have crossed again, and I can't wait to see what we can accomplish together! 🔗 Eigen Labs: https://t.co/flBAU78Bvn 🔗 Virtual Embryo × Yukon: https://t.co/1fM5gJPYjr 🔗 Our original Scribe paper: https://t.co/31ke3Mwdjj #VirtualEmbryo #AIforScience #ScientificDiscovery #HumanAICollaboration #EigenLabs #Yukon #Stanford #ComputationalBiology