Michael Skinnider, assistant member of the Ludwig Princeton Branch, has won the NIH Director's Early Independence Award. 

Since its 2011 inception, the award has provided funding to allow “exceptional junior scientists” to bypass a traditional postdoctoral fellowship and launch independent research labs.

Skinnider and his group are working to illuminate this metabolic dark matter. They are developing cutting-edge AI technologies to translate data from mass spectrometers, the workhorse of metabolomics, to identify these chemical structures and link them to human diseases, including cancer. This Early Independence Award will support his creation of “a machine-learning platform to illuminate the chemical dark matter in mass spectrometry-based metabolomics.”