Nicolò Fusi is a Vice President and Distinguished Scientist at Microsoft Research, where he leads the AI research teams on the East Coast (New York, Boston, and Montreal), developing new model architectures and learning algorithms for language models, reinforcement learning, and agentic systems. Besides advancing foundational AI capabilities, a core focus of his team is autonomous scientific discovery in the life sciences, centered on building biological world models that propose therapeutic interventions and simulate their outcomes.

His group has designed novel functional proteins, advanced predictive modeling for CRISPR gene editing, and built clinical AI systems deployed in hospitals worldwide. Earlier, his work on Bayesian optimization and automated machine learning contributed to the foundations of Azure AutoML, and he co-developed optimal-transport-based methods for data-centric AI. These threads come together in his current focus: making scientific discovery scalable, verifiable, and increasingly autonomous.