Regina Barzilay, a BGU CS Alumna (BA '93 and MS '98; advisor: Prof. Michael Elhadad) and currently a professor at MIT and a recognized leader in the field of Computational Linguistics, is a recipient of a 2017 MacArthur Fellowship, sometimes referred to as a “genius grant".
Short bio:
Regina Barzilay received B.A. ('93) and M.S. ('98, advisor: Prof. Michael Elhadad) degrees from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and a Ph.D. ('03, advisor: Prof. Kathleen McKeown) from Columbia University. Next, she was a postdoc at Cornell University. Currently she is a Delta Electronics professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research interests are in natural language processing, applications of deep learning to chemistry and oncology. 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.
For more details on her winning the MacArthur Fellowship please visit MIT News:
http://news.mit.edu/2017/mit-computer-scientist-regina-barzilay-wins-macarthur-genius-grant-1011
