EPFL Professors named Schmidt Sciences AI2050 Fellows
Charlotte Bunne, Antoine Bosselut, Martin Schrimpf © 2025 EPFL /Max Canarelli
Antoine Bosselut, Charlotte Bunne and Martin Schrimpf have been awarded prestigious 2025 Schmidt Sciences AI2050 fellowships to focus on how to fulfill AI’s potential to dramatically benefit humankind.
EPFL has become the first university in mainland Europe to have researchers admitted to the Schmidt Sciences AI2050 Fellows Community, this year receiving three fellowships, more than any other institute globally in 2025. The Fellows program supports ‘exceptional people working on the key opportunities and hardest problems that are critical to get right for society to benefit from AI'.
Schmidt Sciences is an influential, US based not-for-profit co-founded by the former Google CEO and executive chairman of Alphabet, Eric Schmidt with his wife, Wendy. This year’s twenty-eight fellows are the 4th cohort of the program, which now supports ninety-nine researchers across eight countries, the majority in the United States. Europe’s only other fellowship was awarded at Germany’s Max Planck Institute in 2024.
Assistant professor, Antoine Bosselut from the School of Computer and Communication Sciences, and Assistant Professors Charlotte Bunne and Martin Schrimpf, jointly with the School of Computer and Communication Sciences and School of Life Sciences, have been recognized for their bold and ambitious work in AI.
As Early Career fellows, they each receive 500,000 USD in funding to support a three-year project that advances their research as well as additional support, such as connections to stakeholders, to help them advance and amplify their results.
Antoine Bosselut - Democratizing LLMs for languages around the world
Large Language Models (LLMs) have principally benefited communities whose languages are well-represented in the data used for training LLMs, such as English or Chinese. While these few “high-resource” languages are used by many around the world, they do not cover large segments of the global population of 8.2 billion, who collectively speak over 7000 languages. Bosselut’s project will democratize LLMs for these users, leveraging new algorithms that catalyze LLMs to understand and speak these languages, all while reflecting the nuances of the regions where these languages are spoken, and the cultures of the people that speak them.
Charlotte Bunne - Introducing biological world models
Biology needs its own transformative leap in artificial intelligence: moving beyond static snapshots to systems that simulate, understand, and reason, about living cells and tissues. Bunne’s project introduces biological world models: computational frameworks that integrate multimodal data into structured, spatially and molecularly grounded representations of cellular and tissue organization. Equipped with generative simulators and intelligent reasoning agents in a closed feedback loop, these models forecast system dynamics, test hypotheses, and optimize therapeutic strategies. Validated through collaborations with experimental and clinical partners, this approach lays the foundation for simulation-based discovery and decision support, with initial applications in cancer treatment prediction.
Martin Schrimpf – Building digital twins of the human brain
Schrimpf will build digital “twins” of the human brain: computational models that integrate large-scale neural data and AI methodology to simulate how the brain transforms sensory inputs into meaning. His work aims to uncover the mechanisms underlying perception and cognition and to extend these models to brain conditions such as dyslexia. This research paves the way for predictive, data-driven neuroscience as well as model-guided clinical interventions.
Ambitious and collaborative research
“AI2050 Early Career Fellows are selected using a highly selective nomination process, making it an incredible honor for EPFL to have been recognized with three 2025 fellowships in such multi-disciplinary AI research. This demonstrates that our institution and Switzerland are at the forefront, of not only fundamental AI, but also of AI applied to other sciences,” said Sabine Süsstrunk, Dean of the School of Computer and Communication Sciences.
The focus of the Schmidt Sciences AI2050 Program underscores that artificial intelligence will bring about an epochal shift in our society with the AI2050 fellows shaping that change so that it is of wide benefit to as many people as possible.
“AI is underhyped, especially when it comes to its potential to benefit humanity,” said Eric Schmidt. “The AI2050 fellowship was established to turn that potential into reality by supporting the people and ideas shaping a healthier, more resilient, and more secure world.”