Casey Greene, a PSOM assistant professor of systems pharmacology and translational therapeutics, has been awarded funding from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, an advised fund of Silicon Valley Community Foundation. The Initiative was created by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, a pediatrician.

This award will support Dr. Greene’s work on the Human Cell Atlas, a global effort to map every type of cell in the human body as a resource for investigating health and disease. The Initiative’s broad focus includes an emphasis on science through basic biomedical research and education through personalized learning.

The new funding is focused on developing open, shared computational tools and algorithms. As one of 85 one-year awards to researchers worldwide, he will deploy a powerful, “unsupervised” machine-learning algorithm called a variational auto-encoder, which learns to identify and summarize patterns in large data sets without being instructed what features to look for. Dr. Greene’s aim is to simulate, predict and catalogue what happens to each cell type contained in the Human Cell Atlas under various scenarios. The resulting information will be invaluable in better explaining how biological systems function at the cellular and organism levels, enabling researchers to eventually predict how the expression of every known gene might change under various conditions. This endeavor is vital for providing new treatments for patients and conducting life-saving research.