Since 2016, YerevaNN, a lab focused on computer science research, has connected students and young scientists in Armenia with professors all over the world to produce high quality research papers. In 2021, Americans for Artsakh helped YerevaNN Educational Foundation led by Hrant Khachatrian to start a large project on the development of AI models for predicting chemical properties of molecules. It is one of the most important topics in drug design, as it is extremely expensive to produce millions of drug candidates or to measure their properties. AI methods give an opportunity to predict those properties without physical production of the molecules, enabling analysis on a much larger scale. This project is a collaboration with a team of biologists from the Institute of Molecular Biology in Armenia and a world-famous biologist from Germany.
Funds from Americans for Artsakh, mobilized through the efforts of Amazasp Shaumyan and Yervand Nersisyan, have helped YerevaNN to hire two junior researchers full-time and significantly improve its computing resources. The project has already resulted in one research paper (currently under peer review, https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.04929) with a second research paper in progress.
