Assistant Professor of Statistics and Herbert and Florence Irving Assistant Professor of Cancer Data Research (in the Herbert and Florence Irving Institute for Cancer Dynamics and in the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center)
Bianca Dumitrascu joined Columbia University in the Spring 2023 as an Assistant Professor of Statistics and Herbert and Florence Irving Assistant Professor of Cancer Data Research (in the Herbert and Florence Institute for Cancer Dynamics and in the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center). Before Columbia, Bianca was an Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science and Technology (Computer Laboratory) at the University of Cambridge. Bianca was a Departmental Early Career Fellow in the Accelerate Programme for Scientific Discovery. Bianca works at the intersection of machine learning and genetics. Her main research interest is understanding how local molecular rules give raise to emergent spatial patterns in the context of biological dynamical systems. To this end, Bianca uses techniques from statistical optimization, statistical physics and domain adaptation to identify contextual phenotypes in spatial transcriptomic data and to understand the identity of single cells and their interactions in early developement. She is also interested in active learning and graphical neural networks as models to study message passing in multi-agent systems.