Stanford faculty member Xiaojie Qiu has been awarded a High-Risk, High-Reward Research program grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which recognizes “highly innovative scientists who propose visionary and broadly impactful behavioral and biomedical research projects.” Qiu is an assistant professor of genetics at Stanford Medicine and, by courtesy, of computer science in the School of Engineering. He is also a member of the BASE program, Stanford Bio-X, and the Maternal & Child Health Research Institute.

“The HRHR program champions exceptionally bold and innovative science that pushes the boundaries of biomedical and behavioral research,” said Tara A. Schwetz, the NIH deputy director for program coordination, planning, and strategic initiatives and director of the Division of Program Coordination, Planning, and Strategic Initiatives, which oversees the NIH Common Fund, in the award announcement. “The groundbreaking science pursued by these researchers is poised to have a broad impact on human health.”

The NIH recognized Qiu with a Director’s New Innovator Award, which “supports early career investigators of exceptional creativity who propose bold and highly innovative research projects with the potential to produce a major impact on broad, important areas relevant to the NIH mission.”

Qiu has a long track record in developing widely used computational frameworks (including Monocle 2/3, Dynamo, and Spateo) for unsupervised learning of developmental trajectories, predictive RNA velocity vector fields, and spatiotemporal modeling of whole mouse embryos. With this award he aims to construct the first-ever foundational virtual model of whole-embryo mouse embryogenesis. Such virtual embryo models will allow him to make meaningful predictions about how genetic or microenvironment perturbation will affect cell-cell communication, cell growth, cell migration, and cell state dynamics over time and space, eventually shedding light on the pathogenesis of many diseases, such as congenital heart diseases.

The Qiu Lab, which launched at Stanford in December of 2023, focuses on heart evolution, development, and disease and is actively growing its team of developmental biologists, technology developers, and machine learning experts.