Regina Barzilay, School of Engineering Distinguished Professor for AI and Health at MIT, CSAIL member, and Jameel Clinic AI Faculty Lead, was recently elected to the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) for her work in applying machine learning to health and medicine. Considered one of the highest honors for individuals in health care, the academy inducts scholars and leaders who have made significant contributions to their respective fields.
The NAM facilitates work across disciplines, sparking novel approaches to “accelerate progress” towards global healthy equity. Barzilay is one of 100 new inductees to receive the yearly honor.
Her recent research was catalyzed by her own breast cancer diagnosis in 2014. In 2017, she developed a machine learning model that could have detected her disease earlier. The following year, Barzilay helped launch the Jameel Clinic, which now develops novel artificial intelligence algorithms suitable for modeling the biological and clinical data of diseases like cancer, Parkinson’s, and COVID-19.
Her oncology research focuses on personalizing screening with artificial intelligence and creating algorithms for early breast cancer diagnosis and risk assessment. Barzilay helped construct Mirai, a risk-assessment algorithm that can help predict breast cancer. More recently, she helped develop Sybil, a deep learning model that can detect future lung cancer risk by analyzing mamograms. The tool analyzes low-dose computed tomography (LDCT) scans without the help of a radiologist, assessing patients’ chances of developing the cancer within the next six years. Both Mirai and Sybil have been validated in multiple populations around the world and are currently part of prospective clinical trials.
Her work in drug discovery includes collaborating to create models that can help select molecule candidates useful in therapeutics. Aiming to speed up drug development, she helped discover Halicin, an antibiotic capable of killing many species of disease-causing bacteria that were antibiotic-resistant, including Acinetobacter baumannii and clostridium difficile (“c-diff”).
Barzilay was recently inducted into the National Academy of Engineering, too, making her a member of two institutions within the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has earned the National Science Foundation Career Award, the MIT Technology Review TR35 Award, MIT’s Jamieson Award for excellence in teaching, and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence’s (AAAI) $1 million Squirrel AI Award for Artificial Intelligence for the Benefit of Humanity. Barzilay also has a MacArthur Fellowship, an AAAI fellowship, the Microsoft Faculty Fellowship, and Best Paper awards at the NACL and ACL.
