Federal Project Grant Award Summary

Award Details: Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai received a $204,412.00 CAREER Project Grant from the National Science Foundation's Division of Information and Intelligent Systems under the Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) program (CFDA 47.070). The award, initiated July 1, 2026, extends through June 30, 2031, and supports research in computational immunology and protein language modeling at the institution's New York location.

Deliverables and Services: This project will develop structure-aware protein language models to decode T cell receptor recognition mechanisms and their interaction with peptide antigens presented by major histocompatibility complex molecules. The research will produce computational methods integrating sequence, structure, and spatial information using transformer architecture with masked multimodal prediction and contrastive learning approaches. Key deliverables include high-confidence three-dimensional models of paired T cell receptors, novel computational frameworks linking receptor recognition with cellular function through integration with single-cell transcriptomic profiles, and openly shared software, datasets, and educational materials. The award also supports a month-long summer program in New York City introducing high school students to immunology, data science, and machine learning through hands-on projects and mentorship, with experimental validation studies conducted to refine the research framework iteratively. These outputs are intended to advance understanding of immune recognition with applications to cancer immunotherapy, autoimmunity, and future biomedical discovery.