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Regina Barzilay

AI Faculty Lead

Regina Barzilay is a School of Engineering Distinguished Professor for AI and Health in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at MIT. Since 2018, she has been the AI faculty lead for Jameel Clinic and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL)

Her research interests are in machine learning models for clinical use and molecular modeling with applications to drug discovery. She also works in natural language processing.

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 “Genius Grant”, an ACL fellowship, and an AAAI fellowship. In 2020, she was awarded the Squirrel AI Award for Artificial Intelligence for the Benefit of Humanity. She received her PhD in Computer Science from Columbia University, and spent a year as a postdoc at Cornell University. Barzilay received her undergraduate degree from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel.

Research Group Website

Awards and Accolades

  • 2023 Fellow, National Academy of Medicine
  • 2022 Fellow, American Academy of Arts & Sciences
  • 2021 AACC Wallace H. Coulter Lectureship Award
  • 2021 UNESCO/Netexplo Award
  • 2021 AAAI Squirrel AI Award for Artificial Intelligence for the Benefit of Humanity
  • 2019 Top 100 AI Leaders in Drug Discovery & Advanced Healthcare
  • 2019 Xconomy Boston Digital Trailblazer
  • 2018 Susan Komen Scholar
  • 2018 Ruth and Joel Spira Award for Excellence in Teaching
  • 2017 AAAI Fellowship
  • 2017 ACL Fellowship
  • 2017 MacArthur Fellowship
  • 2016 Best Paper Award, EMNLP
  • 2016 Burgess & Elizabeth Jamieson Award for Excellence in Teaching
  • 2016 Delta Electronics Professor
  • 2015 Best Paper Honorable Mention, EMNLP
  • 2014 Faculty Research Innovation Fellowship
  • 2014 Best Student Paper Award, NAACL
  • 2010 Best Paper Award, SLT
  • 2009 Carolyn Baldwin Morrison Lecture, Cornell
  • 2009 Best Paper Award, ACL
  • 2006 Ross Career Development Professor
  • 2006 Microsoft Faculty Fellowship
  • 2006 IEEE Intelligent Systems: “AI Ten to Watch”
  • 2005 Technology Review: 35 Top Innovators
  • 2005 NSF Career Award
  • 2004 Technology Research News: “Top Picks: Technology Research Advances of 2004”
  • 2004 Best Paper Award, HLT/NAACL
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