Shirley Ho

Shirley Ho is an American astrophysicist and machine learning expert, currently Group Leader at Simons Foundation and a Professor at New York University, with a visiting appointment at Princeton University.

​Shirley Ho has led the first application of deep 3D convolutional neural networks in astrophysics and has since pushed forward the adoption of modern deep learning methods in the astrophysics community. More recently, Shirley Ho has concentrated her efforts on developing novel techniques in interpretable machine learning and creating foundation models for science via her effort as the PI in Polymathic AI.

Shirley Ho won several prizes for her significant contributions to the fields of astrophysics and AI. The list includes National Blavatnik Award Finalist, European Physical Society Giuseppe and Vanna Cocconi Prize in cosmology, NASA Group Achievement Award, Macronix Prize, Carnegie Science Award. She was also elected as a Fellow of the International Astrostatistics Association in 2020.

AI2050 Project

Current AI systems excel at language but lack real understanding of how the world works—they discuss science without truly grasping scientific principles. Meanwhile, specialized AI models like AlphaFold understand protein structures but remain isolated tools. Ho’s work proposes the first systematic approach to combine these capabilities, creating AI that integrates human-like reasoning with deep scientific knowledge across sciences. Over three years, Shirley will develop methods to understand how scientific AI models work, merge them beneficially, and integrate them with language AI. This could enable the first AI systems with genuine world understanding—a critical step toward scientific artificial general intelligence.