Rate My Professor Regina Barzilay

Regina Barzilay is a School of Engineering Distinguished Professor for AI and Health in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she is affiliated with the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). She serves as the AI Faculty Lead at the MIT Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health. Barzilay received her undergraduate degree from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel, a PhD in Computer Science from Columbia University, and completed a one-year postdoctoral fellowship at Cornell University. She joined the MIT faculty in 2003, was appointed Delta Electronics Professor in 2016, and named School of Engineering Distinguished Professor for AI and Health in 2021. Her career includes pioneering advancements in natural language processing and a shift toward applying machine learning to healthcare and life sciences.

Barzilay's research specializes in machine learning methods for drug discovery, molecular design, clinical AI, and oncology. Notable contributions include a deep learning mammography-based model for improved breast cancer risk prediction (2019), Sybil, a validated deep learning model to predict future lung cancer risk from low-dose chest CT (2023), DiffDock for molecular docking (2022), EquiBind for drug binding structure prediction, and VaxSeer for flu vaccine strain selection. Earlier achievements in natural language processing earned Best Paper Awards at ACL (2009), HLT/NAACL (2004), EMNLP (2016), and others. Her work has significant impact on early cancer detection, antibiotic discovery, and generative AI for biomolecules. Barzilay has received prestigious honors, including the IEEE Frances E. Allen Medal (2025), TIME100 AI list (2025), MacArthur Fellowship (2017), AAAI Squirrel AI Award for Artificial Intelligence for the Benefit of Humanity ($1 million, 2020), AAAI and ACL Fellowships (2017), NSF Career Award (2005), and election to the National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Medicine (2023).