Inaugural
AI in Science Symposium

Inaugural
AI in Science Symposium

Friday, January 30, 2026 8:00am — 6:30pm PST CALIT2 Auditorium (Building #325) 4100 E Peltason Dr. Irvine, CA

Friday, January 30, 2026
8:00am — 7:00pm PST
CALIT2 Auditorium (Building #325)
4100 E Peltason Dr.
Irvine, CA

Inaugural
AI in Science Symposium

Join us for the inaugural UC Irvine AI in Science Symposium, hosted by the AI in Science Institute, a university-wide interdisciplinary initiative. Open to the UCI community and beyond, the event features speakers covering AI Foundations, AI + Physical Science, AI + Life Science, and AI + Society.

Speaker Lineup

University of Copenhagen

University of California, Irvine

New York University

The Arctic University of Norway

Theofanis Karaletsos

Chan Zuckerberg Initiative

Michael Mahoney

University of California, Berkeley

University of California, Irvine

NVIDIA / University of California, Irvine

Eindhoven / Chan Zuckerberg Initiative

Rose Yu

University of California, San Diego

Agenda

8:00 AM

Registration

8:50 AM

Introductions

AI Foundations

9:00 AM

Towards AI Co-Scientist: Agentic Foundation Models for Physical Sciences

Rose Yu

9:45 AM

Foundational Methods for Foundation Models for Scientific Machine Learning

Michael Mahoney

10:30 AM

Coffee break

10:45 AM

Generative Diffusion Models for Scientific Discovery

Stephan Mandt

AI + Physical Sciences

11:30 AM

Advances in AI for Weather and Climate Science

Mike Pritchard

12:15 PM

Lunch break

1:15 PM

Neural Operator Function Embedding for Climate Data Visualisation

Robert Jenssen

AI + Life Sciences

2:00 PM

Generative AI for Cell Biology

Theofanis Karaletsos

2:45 PM

Coffee break

3:00 PM

Supervised Contrastive Block Disentanglement to Preserve Biological Signals

Kyunghyun Cho

3:45 PM

From Pixels to Cells: Advancing Diffusion Models for Biomedical Data

Jakub Tomczak

4:30 PM

AI for Analysis of Life-Long Trajectories of Multimorbidity

Søren Brunak

AI + Society

5:15 PM

AI Challenges (and Opportunities)

Pierre Baldi

6:00 PM

Food and Wine Reception