Project summary

I have my M.S. in Computer Science (Data Science) and 4 years of startup ML engineering experience. I am a visiting researcher at the University of Edinburgh, working on applications of machine learning, causal inference, and geometric methods towards computational biology and other related topics.

Publishing papers enables these methods to be used in the field and are beneficial for me to achieve future funding, institutional backing from other organizations and potentially enroll in a PhD program.

I have finished several papers but the university does not provide APC support to visiting resaerchers, and I currently do not have a full time paying job.

Any help towards APCs would be greatly appreciated.

If you would like to ask any questions, please reach out to my email: elliot@mechanisticresearch.org

What are this project's goals? How will you achieve them?

The papers have been finished and are in review. I am working on the first revision after reviews from Frontiers in Pharmacology and will resubmit in the coming days.

How will this funding be used?

Mechanistic interpretability applied to bio:

Structure awareness in RNA and DNA foundation models — RNA (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press), submitting shortly https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21362717 — $1500 (minus outstanding waiver)

Construct validity failure in single-cell embedding evaluation — Genome Biology, submitting shortly — $5,690 (minus outstanding waiver) https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21351298

Drug Transport

Direction Instability: A Magnitude-Invariant Metric for Cross-Cell-Line Drug Mechanism Transport — PLOS Computational Biology, under review — $2,215 (after $950 fee-assistance waiver) https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21227647

A Pre-Registered Direction Instability Atlas Across Three Perturbation Modalities — PLOS Computational Biology, under review (six reviewers) — $1,899 (after a $1,266 fee-assistance waiver) https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21223667

Pharmacology

Drug Failures Partition into Two Kinds: Cross-Design Evidence Diagnosis Across Ten Disease Domains — Frontiers in Pharmacology, interactive review — $3,940 (minus outstanding 30-40% waiver) https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21227354

Who is on your team? What's your track record on similar projects?

I am working solo. I have a published paper at ICML 2022 - https://proceedings.mlr.press/v162/das22a.html and recently accepted and presented a poster at the NEMI 2026 workshop.

Here is my personal website: https://elliottower.ai/, and my comp. bio portfolio https://mechanisticresearch.org/

What are the most likely causes and outcomes if this project fails?

I will return any funding which is not needed for APCs (rejections, fee waivers, etc).

Committed: $8,054 for the three papers in review. Two more are not yet submitted and their waivers are undecided; the full range is $6,500–15,400.

How much money have you raised in the last 12 months, and from where?

None