Arc AIxBio Fellows Program for Undergrads

Arc Institute is an independent nonprofit research organization based in Palo Alto, California, founded in the pursuit of scientific curiosity. As a leader in AI and biotechnology, we’ve launched projects such as the virtual cell model STATE, the DNA biological foundation models Evo 1 and Evo 2, and the Virtual Cell Challenge.

At Arc, we believe transformative discoveries emerge from creative collaboration and technical ambition. Our mission is to accelerate discovery, uncover the root causes of complex diseases, and close the gap between scientific breakthroughs and real-world impacts.

We are committed to nurturing the next generation of life scientists and are inviting undergraduate students interested in AIxBio to propose open, exploratory projects they can work on at their home institutions in partnership with Arc researchers for 6-12 months.

Over the course of their projects, Fellows will work with dedicated mentors with the goal of generating tangible outputs: code, models, analyses, and ideally publications or conference submissions. This is a part-time (~10 hours a week) and remote position intended to coincide with your coursework.

Mentorship Dedicated guidance from investigators, postdocs, and staff scientists through weekly Zoom meetings and dedicated Slack channel support

Resources A stipend as well as access to Cloud and GPU compute to accelerate your research, plus onboarding support to get started quickly.

Recognition Co-authorship opportunities on publications, presentations at Arc or scientific conferences, and pathways to future internships or collaborations

• Teams of 2-3 undergraduate students, formed independently within or across institutions
• Strong technical skills and demonstrated curiosity about AI and life science
• Commitment to open, reproducible research and collaborative science
• Ability to dedicate 6-12 months to the project
• Be based in North America (no citizenship restrictions)

• 2027 applications available: January 2027

Arc’s inaugural cohort is made up of five teams and thirteen students (tap on the arrow under each fellow’s photo to see their biography).

The Proteomies

Project Microbial-aware ML for single-cell spatial proteomics, making host-microbe interactions visible where they’ve long been invisible

Mentor Hamed Najafabadi, Associate Professor, Human Genetics, McGill University

Members

SAT

Project Few-shot-in-context learning for epigenome prediction, treating cell types as something a model learns from examples, not a fixed label

Mentor Jingtian Zhou, Science Fellow, Arc Institute

Members

ReLearn

Project Reinforcement learning for cancer drug combination discovery, training an agent to kill malignant cells while sparing healthy ones

Mentor Ali Emadi, Postdoctoral Fellow, Goodarzi Lab, Arc Institute

Members

BioReason-Cell

Project A multimodal cell LLM that reasons how perturbations drive biological changes, moving virtual cells from predictors to reasoning engines

Mentor Ivy Liu, Postdoctoral Fellow, Goodarzi Lab, Arc Institute

Members

STATE Harness

Project An orchestration layer connecting STATE with bioinformatics tools and foundation models, enabling lab-in-the-loop workflows

Mentor Abhinav Adduri, ML Tech Lead for Virtual Cell, Computational Technology Center, Arc Institute

Members