A leading research university with a world-class medical center, WashU is putting AI to work across labs and disciplines to turn ambitious research into solutions that improve lives.
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Featured Research
Accelerating Breakthrough Alzheimer’s Cures
Dr. Randall Bateman and collaborators at WashU Medicine are developing new AI-powered tools designed to accelerate Alzheimer’s disease research and improve understanding of neurodegenerative disease progression.
Art that Challenges AI Imaging
Tiffany Calvert’s collaboration with the McKelvey School of Engineering combines AI-generated images, abstraction and oil painting to reveal human bias in image datasets, insights that may improve tools for medical imaging.
Actionable Intelligence for Global Food Systems
Nathan Jacobs and collaborators at McKelvey School of Engineering are developing a geospatial artificial intelligence capability to detect early signs of instability in crop production.
Research News
AI agents prompt redesign of web for security, privacy, reliability
Funded by a NSF Career Award, Umar Iqbal plans to redesign the web with infrastructures catered to AI agents and to meet higher, safer and stricter standards.
New technique evaluates reliability of AI-enabled medical imaging
WashU researchers have developed a method called that ranks AI-based imaging tools for accuracy, even when there’s no known “ground truth” to compare against. In tests, it correctly identified the most precise imaging method 95% of the time.
Machine learning methods move self-driving labs closer to materials discovery at scale
WashU researchers are training AI agents to screen thousands of chemical possibilities and flag the most promising candidates. One project already found 10 new materials that outperform current water-harvesting tech.
AI Infrastructure and Resources for Research
High-Performance Computing
GPU- and CPU-intensive compute clusters, including dedicated H100 GPU capacity, for training, fine-tuning, and running AI models at scale.
Secure, Compliant Environments
Infrastructure and tools approved for sensitive and regulated data, including HIPAA-protected health information, enabling secure AI-driven research.
Hands-on Development Support
Consulting, prototyping, and software development support from experts in AI development, clinical application, and research translation, helping investigators refine ideas, build AI-enabled tools, and strengthen grant proposals.
AI-Enabled Imaging
A dedicated center for computational and AI-enabled imaging science, uniting radiology, engineering, and computer science to build next-generation imaging tools.
AI Research Funding
The WashU Research Seed Grant Program supports innovative, interdisciplinary projects and teams that meaningfully leverage AI to to catalyze interdisciplinary collaborations, advance discovery, enhance research capabilities, and address complex societal challenges.
Teams without in-house AI expertise are encouraged to contact the DI2 Accelerator at di2accelerator@wustl.edu for consultation on methods, compute, and technical scoping during proposal development.
Areas of Focus
Researchers are invited to submit proposals that align with one or more of the following areas of focus. The examples below are illustrative and not exhaustive.
Work that integrates AI to generate new knowledge, augment existing methods, and foster cross-disciplinary collaboration between computational and domain experts.
Work that uses AI to enhance research processes, including data analysis, modeling, simulation, and hypothesis generation, as well as the development of scalable, AI-assisted approaches.
Work that advances the development or use of datasets, data pipelines, and computational tools that enable effective and responsible use of AI.
Work that addresses fairness, bias, transparency, explainability, governance, and the broader ethical, legal, and societal implications of AI, including human- AI interaction and AI-enabled decision making.
Work that advances AI-enabled applications in applied or practice-based settings including pilot projects, prototypes, and implementation-oriented research.
Work that applies AI to pressing challenges such as resilient ecosystems, health and wellbeing, and social and economic systems, as well as other emerging areas of inquiry.
Information Sessions
AI Research Groups & Labs
Explore the teams, institutes, and labs across campus that can help get your AI research started.
If you are aware of additional resources to add to the list, please contact us.
Machine Learning & AI at McKelvey Engineering
Faculty in Computer Science & Engineering conduct research spanning machine learning, computer vision, data mining, and knowledge discovery.
AI Humanities Lab
An interdisciplinary research group that applies AI and computational methods to humanities research while studying AI’s historical development, biases, and cultural and creative impact.
Multimodal Vision Research Laboratory
A computer vision research lab developing multimodal representation learning, geospatial AI, generative modeling, and related methods at planetary scale.
Institute for Informatics, Data Science & Biostatistics (I2DB)
A cross-disciplinary research community advancing data science, biomedical informatics, and AI-driven healthcare innovation.
WashU Law AI Collaborative
An interdisciplinary initiative exploring the impact of AI on law, policy, ethics, and society through research and collaboration.
Computational Imaging Research Center
A multidisciplinary center advancing computational imaging, informatics, and AI methods to improve biomedical research, disease understanding, and patient-specific diagnosis.
Research Profiles
Search for researchers at WashU by topic and explore their publications and other scholarly work from WashU Medicine and the Bursky School of Public Health, with profiles for all WashU faculty coming soon.
Get in touch
Contact us to connect with AI research resources at WashU, explore partnership opportunities, or add your resource or research to this page.