Simons Professor of Mathematics at MIT |
Bonnie Berger is the Simons Professor of Mathematics at MIT, holds a joint appointment in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and serves as head of the Computation and Biology group at MIT’s Computer Science and AI Lab. Her recent work focuses on designing algorithms to gain biological insights from advances in automated data collection and the subsequent large data sets drawn from them. She works on a diverse set of problems, including Compressive Genomics, Network Inference, Structural Bioinformatics, Genomic Privacy, and Medical Genomics. Additionally, she collaborates closely with biologists in order to design experiments to maximally leverage the power of computation for biological explorations.
After beginning her career working in algorithms at MIT, she was one of the pioneer researchers in the area of computational molecular biology and, together with the many students she has mentored, has been instrumental in defining the field. Professor Berger has won numerous awards including a National Science Foundation Career Award and the Biophysical Society’s Dayhoff Award for research. In 1999 Professor Berger was named one of Technology Review Magazine’s inaugural TR100 as a top young innovator of the twenty-first century, in 2004, was elected as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, and in 2010, received the RECOMB Test of Time Award.
She was recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, received the Margaret Pittman Director’s Award at the NIH, was elected as Fellow of both the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) and American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), and received an Honorary Doctorate from EPFL. She currently serves as Vice President of the ISCB, Head of the steering committee for RECOMB, and member of Sloan Fellowship Selection Committee. She also serves on the Executive Editorial Board of Journal of Computational Biology and as member of the editorial boards of Annual Reviews for Biomedical Data Science, Genome Biology, Bioinformatics, IEEE/ACM TCBB, and Cell Systems. In addition, Professor Berger is an Associate Member of the Broad Institute, Faculty member of Harvard/MIT Health Science & Technology, and Affiliated Faculty of Harvard Medical School.