College of Veterinary Medicine researcher awarded competitive Microsoft Research Fellowship

Washington State University researcher Sascha Duttke has been awarded a prestigious Microsoft Research Fellowship with a stipend to further his work into decoding DNA’s “spatial grammar” — the hidden rules that determine how genes are switched on and off.

Fellowships with Microsoft Research are awarded under numerous AI-related “challenges” aimed at advancing scientific understanding and societal benefit. Duttke’s fellowship is tied to the “Generative models for regulatory genomics” challenge, which focuses on developing new AI systems capable of interpreting the rules embedded in regulatory DNA.

Duttke, an assistant professor in the WSU College of Veterinary Medicine’s School of Molecular Biosciences, hopes the collaboration with Microsoft Research will help in the creation of a new AI model that can decode DNA’s “spatial grammar” to give researchers a better understanding of how genes are controlled and how small inherited or acquired…