Caroline Uhler named SIAM Fellow for 2023

April 3, 2023

Jennifer Donovan (LIDS)  I  Jane Halpern (EECS)  (Original Article)

The Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) is proud to announce that Caroline Uhler, Professor of EECS and in the Institute for Data, Systems and Society (IDSS), has been named a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), Class of 2023. In the award announcement, SIAM noted that Uhler is being honored for her “fundamental contributions at the interface of statistics, machine learning, and biology”.

Uhler joined the MIT faculty in 2015 and is currently a full professor in EECS (Electrical Engineering & Computer Science) and IDSS (Institute for Data, Systems and Society). At MIT she is also affiliated with LIDS (Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems), the Center for Statistics, Machine Learning at MIT, and the ORC (Operations Research Center). In addition, she is a core member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where she is a co-director of the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center. Uhler’s research focuses on machine learning, statistics and computational biology, in particular on causal inference, generative modeling, and applications to genomics. Her use of probabilistic graphical models and development of scalable algorithms with healthcare applications has enabled her research group to gain insights into causal relationships hidden within massive amounts of data (such as those generated during gene knockout or knockdown experiments.)

Uhler holds an MSc in mathematics, a BSc in biology, and an MEd in mathematics education from the University of Zurich, and a PhD in statistics from UC Berkeley. Before joining MIT, she spent a semester in the "Big Data" program at the Simons Institute at UC Berkeley, held postdoctoral positions at the IMA and at ETH Zurich, and spent 3 years as an assistant professor at IST Austria. She is an elected member of the International Statistical Institute, and is the recipient of a Simons Investigator Award, a Sloan Research Fellowship, an NSF Career Award, a Sofja Kovalevskaja Award from the Humboldt Foundation, and a START Award from the Austrian Science Foundation.