Regina Barzilay

Regina Barzilay was born in Moldavia.⁠[1]

She received a BA (1993) and an MS (1998) from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and a PhD from Columbia UniversityColumbia UniversityColumbia University, formally Columbia University in the City of New York, is a private research university in New York City and a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1754 by royal charter from King George II as King's College, it is the oldest institution of higher education in New York State and the fifth oldest in the United States. It was renamed Columbia College in 1784 and adopted the university name and moved to Manhattan's Morningside Heights in 1896. It has 17 schools and four affiliated colleges, with 35,978 students enrolled in fall 2025. Legal scholar Jennifer L. Mnookin became president on July 1, 2026.Open the full entry in 2003, the year she joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).⁠[2]

In 2005 she was named one of Technology Review’s 35 Top Innovators and received an NSF CAREER Award.⁠[3]

She has recounted that she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2014 after a routine mammogram, and that during treatment she was struck by how little data and machine learning were used in oncology to select and personalize treatment, which convinced her that this had to change.⁠[4]

In 2015 her lab began analyzing 71,000 mammograms from 31,000 patients to train a model to spot early signs of disease invisible to the human eye, in partnership with Constance Lehman, chief of breast imaging at Massachusetts General Hospital.⁠[1]

In October 2017 she was named a MacArthur Fellow; the foundation noted that she and a student deciphered ancient Ugaritic using Hebrew and that she pioneered reinforcement learning methods that ground language in actions in the world.⁠[2]

In October 2018 she and James Collins were named faculty co-leads of the Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health (J-Clinic), which MIT had launched on September 17 that year to develop machine learning technologies for preventing, detecting and treating disease.⁠[5]

In May 2019 a deep learning model she developed was published in Radiology; trained on mammograms and outcomes from more than 60,000 patients at Massachusetts General Hospital, it predicts whether a patient is likely to develop breast cancer within five years and performed significantly better than existing approaches.⁠[6]

In July 2019 she, Jiaming Luo of MIT and Yuan Cao of Google presented a machine learning system for deciphering lost languages, the first to decipher Linear B automatically.⁠[7]

On September 23, 2019, she appeared on the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast in an episode titled “Deep Learning for Cancer Diagnosis and Treatment”; the description introduces her work in natural language processing and in applying deep learning to chemistry and oncology, and mentions her MIT Introduction to Machine Learning course.⁠[8]

In February 2020 she and James Collins, as senior authors, published a study in Cell in which a machine learning model screening chemical compounds identified halicin, which killed many bacterial strains, including some resistant to all known antibiotics, and cleared infections in two mouse models.⁠[9]

On September 23, 2020, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) named her the first recipient of its new $1 million Squirrel AI Award for Artificial Intelligence for the Benefit of Humanity, recognizing her machine learning work on developing antibiotics and other drugs and on detecting and diagnosing breast cancer early.⁠[10]

In November 2020 she said at the STAT Summit that medical AI systems should be more transparent and judged against common standards, and that developers should train models on diverse populations and report accuracy for different subpopulations.⁠[11]

In January 2023 researchers from MIT’s Jameel Clinic, Mass General Cancer Center and Chang Gung Memorial Hospital published Sybil in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, a model that analyzes low-dose CT scans without a radiologist’s assistance to predict a patient’s risk of lung cancer within six years; she is a co-author of the paper.⁠[12]

In February 2023 she was elected to the National Academy of Engineering for machine learning models that understand structures in text, molecules and medical images.⁠[13]

In December 2024 she was awarded the 2025 IEEE Frances E. Allen Medal for the impact of her machine learning algorithms on medicine and natural language processing; her group had recently released Boltz, an open-source implementation of AlphaFold 3.⁠[14]

As of October 2026 she is the School of Engineering Distinguished Professor of AI and Health at MIT and AI Faculty Lead of MIT’s Jameel Clinic, and a member of the National Academy of Medicine and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.⁠[3]

Personal website: Public link: https://www.regina.csail.mit.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[3]

Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Official website: https://www.mit.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[10]

MIT Jameel Clinic: Official website: https://jclinic.mit.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[12]