Stanford researcher Xiaojie Qiu, PhD, has been awarded a Moonshot Seed Grant from the Laude Institute. Moonshots provide seed funding and multi-year labs to proven academic researchers who are using artificial intelligence to take on species-level challenges.
This first-ever edition of the competition, called Moonshots ONE, drew proposals from a remarkable pool—Fields Medalists, Nobel laureates, and Turing Award recipients among them. Just eight teams were selected as seed grant winners across four categories of broad societal impact.
Dr. Qiu and his team will receive $250,000 and have six months to develop a full proposal for the $10 million multi-year Moonshot lab. Their project is titled “The Virtual Embryo: Predictive Modeling of Human Development and Congenital Defects.”
This achievement did not happen in isolation. Donor support funded the early-stage research on human embryonic development that made Dr. Qiu’s Moonshot proposal possible.
Dr. Qiu joined Stanford in December 2023, becoming the fourth member of the BASE Initiative, a one-of-a-kind research program dedicated to understanding and ultimately curing congenital heart disease (CHD). Learn more about Dr. Qiu’s research and the BASE Initiative.
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