About the Talk

What if we could predict disease before it starts, tailor treatments to each person, and discover new medicines in a fraction of the time? AI could unlock this future for human healthcare.

Grace Zheng and Xin Jin, co-founders of PerturbAI, will show how we’re moving from simply mapping the brain to actually predicting how it works. In partnership with OpenAI, they’ve built one of the largest brain datasets ever created, capturing activity across 8 million cells, and are using AI to uncover the rules that drive biology.

The result: a new era of biology and medicine that is more predictive, more precise, and far more effective.

Zheng and Jin will also demonstrate how AI is transforming science itself, replacing complex, manual workflows with systems that let researchers explore data using everyday language, accelerating discovery and opening the door to many more contributors.

They’ll even introduce the idea of a “digital brain”, a simulation that could allow scientists to test treatments virtually, understand disease at its root, and bring life-saving therapies to patients faster than ever before.

About the Speakers

Xin Jin is a neuroscientist, technology developer, and co-founder of PerturbAI working at the intersection of in vivo functional genomics and disease biology.

She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Neuroscience and the Dorris Neuroscience Center at Scripps Research, and an HHMI Freeman Hrabowski Scholar. Her lab develops scalable in vivo genomic technologies to uncover how genetic programs shape brain circuits across development, homeostasis, and disease.

Her work has helped enable in vivo Perturb-seq, a high-throughput approach that combines pooled CRISPR perturbation with single-cell readouts directly in living tissue. By integrating in vivo CRISPR screening with molecular, spatial, and whole-brain imaging approaches, her research seeks to define how genes influence cell types, tissue architecture, homeostasis, and neural circuit function.

Xin has been recognized with honors including the HHMI Freeman Hrabowski Scholar award, Sloan Research Fellowship, Pew Biomedical Scholar award, McKnight Scholar Award, and MIT Technology Review 35 Innovators Under 35. Before joining Scripps Research, she was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. She received her PhD in Biology from The Rockefeller University and her BS in Chemistry from MIT.

Grace Zheng is a genomics and machine learning leader with over 13 years of experience developing breakthrough platforms at the intersection of biology, data, and therapeutics.

She is the Co-Founder and CEO of PerturbAI, an AI-native therapeutics company accelerating drug discovery through a systems-level understanding of disease. Her work focuses on integrating in vivo Perturb-seq with AI agents and models to map biological circuits directly inside intact organisms, enabling a new generation of biological models and therapeutics grounded in causal, in vivo biology.

Previously, Grace served as Vice President of Computational Biology and Machine Learning at ArsenalBio, where she built and led interdisciplinary teams spanning computational biology, machine learning, and software engineering. She also led strategic collaborations with partners including Genentech and NVIDIA to generate large-scale functional genomics datasets and develop AI models for cell therapy discovery.

Earlier in her career, she joined 10x Genomics as one of the company’s first employees, where she helped pioneer and launch several foundational single-cell genomics technologies.

Her work centers on building enabling technologies, scaling interdisciplinary teams, and transforming biological data into predictive models that guide the next generation of medicines.