Meet Mark Zuckerberg’s Man in the Lab at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative
March 7, 2017
By Mark Terry, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
In September 2016, Priscilla Chan, a physician, and her husband, Facebook chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg, created the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. The two pledged $3 billion towards basic science research over the next 10 years. The goal is that by the end of the century, all disease can be cured, prevented or managed.
In mid-February 2017, the Initiative’s Biohub, an independent research center that will coordinate activities between scientists at University of California of Francisco, UC Berkeley and Stanford University, announced the first cohort of engineers, scientists and technologists. There were 47 of them, and each receives a five-year appointment and up to $1.5 million in funding.
The Guardian interviewed Jeremy Freeman, who is manager of computational biology at the CZ Initiative. Prior to joining CZI, Freeman was at the Janelia Research Campus in Ashburn, Virginia. He said he split his time about 50/50 between neuroscience research and building tools and technologies to “help science happen faster, including methods of data analysis and data sharing.”
At Janelia, Freeman was Group leader, and co-organizer of CodeNeuro. CodeNeuro is a collective of neuroscientists, data scientists, hackers and what they dub “visualizers” who collaborated on understanding the brain. His Janelia laboratory focused on understanding how the brain works by developing technologies for data analysis and visualization and by designing experiments to monitor and manipulate neural activities in animals.
Freeman notes the CZI is moving along, it has a building, staff has moved in, and, “In terms of identifying projects, we are growing rapidly, especially in the intersection of science and engineering, to accelerate science.” One particular area of interest to Freeman is the Human Cell Atlas, which is an international collaboration to characterize and catalogue all human cells. Freeman said, “We are trying to find ways to help support it and to accelerate it, especially in its early stages. Aspects of it that we are especially excited about are developing experimental technology to find new and better ways to characterize gene expression patterns in individual cells, as well as think through data architecture, strategies for organizing, sharing and openly distributing data across a large complex international project.”
Freeman notes that during the course of his career he’s spent a lot of time in traditional academic university settings. He’s also worked in independent research institutions, and the CZI is little bit different than both. “I can honestly say that all of these modes of doing science are incredibly valuable. But what I’m very super-excited about is to bring a lot of the modern advances in software development to bear on some really hard and challenging problems when it comes to working with the vast quantities of complex data that is currently coming out of biology.”
Freeman’s expertise seems in keeping with a January 27 announcement that CZI had acquired Toronto, Ontario-based artificial intelligence company Meta. Meta’s AI technology can read and comprehend scientific papers at a very high speed, providing insights and connections. Its Meta Science is a scientific knowledge network.
Cori Bargmann, the CZI science president, and Brian Pinkerton, its chief technology officer, noted on the CZI’s Facebook page, “Meta will help scientists learn from others’ discoveries in real time, find key papers that may have gone unnoticed, or even predict where their field is headed. The potential for this kind of platform is virtually limitless.”
And when asked if the CZI research will be peer-reviewed and published in journals, Freeman said, “We are absolutely committed to open dissemination of data and code and knowledge; that’s something I have been committed to all the time I’ve been a scientist.”