NAIRR Pilot Award for AI-Driven Biological Discovery

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Last Updated: Nov 09, 2026, 04:30 PM

NAIRR Pilot Award for AI-Driven Biological Discovery

CARBONDALE, Ill. — September 24, 2026

Illustration of a DNA helix and groups of connected network nodes feeding into a hypergraph neural network.

School of Computing Professor Receives NAIRR Pilot Award from the U.S. National Science Foundation to Build Foundation Models for Biological Reasoning

Dr. Khaled Mohammed Saifuddin, assistant professor in the School of Computing and director of KhaledLab at SIU, has received an allocation of 2,965 GPU-hours on the PSC Bridges-2 supercomputer. The allocation, awarded through the U.S. National Science Foundation's National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR) Pilot program, will support the project, “Long-Range Biological Reasoning with Hypergraph Foundation Models.”

Much of biology is not about pairs. A disease may arise from several genes acting together, a drug may affect an entire pathway, and side effects can emerge from interactions among many molecules at once. Hypergraphs can represent these group interactions naturally, but existing AI models often simplify them into one-to-one connections or focus only on nearby relationships, losing important information about how distant parts of a biological network influence each other.

This project will develop a family of foundation-scale hypergraph neural network models designed to capture both these group interactions and the broader structure of the network. The research team will build large-scale biological networks that bring together genes, diseases, drugs, pathways, side effects, and microbiome interactions, and will evaluate the models on tasks ranging from identifying disease-gene associations to finding new, biologically grounded uses for existing drugs.

 

Media Contact: School of Computing Communications • socinfo@siu.edu