4 Nov 2021
Prof. Regina Barzilay, faculty lead for artificial intelligence (AI) at MIT Jameel Clinic, describes how she first came to apply her expertise in machine learning to the medical field and how her research has since evolved to take on some of the major challenges in healthcare such as clinical diagnostics, improving care outcomes and drug discovery.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Jameel Clinic
Regina Barzilay is a School of Engineering Distinguished Professor for AI and Health in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is an AI faculty lead for Jameel Clinic, an MIT center for Machine Learning in Health. Her research interests are in natural language processing and applications of deep learning to chemistry and oncology. She is a recipient of various awards including the NSF Career Award, the MIT Technology Review TR-35 Award, Microsoft Faculty Fellowship and several Best Paper Awards at NAACL and ACL. In 2017, she received a MacArthur fellowship, an ACL fellowship and an AAAI fellowship. In 2021, she was awarded the AAAI Squirrel AI Award for Artificial Intelligence for the Benefit of Humanity, the AACC Wallace H. Coulter Lectureship Award, and the UNESCO/Netexplo Award. She received her PhD in Computer Science from Columbia University, and spent a year as a postdoc at Cornell University. Prof. Barzilay received her undergraduate degree from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel.