Ideas Festival Emory

Dr. Yana Bromberg is a professor in the Departments of Biology and Computer Science at Emory University. She joined Emory in January of last year, transferring from Rutgers University. Yana got her BSc/BEng in Biology and Computer Science from State University of NY at Stony Brook and her PhD in Biomedical Informatics from Burkhard Rost’s lab at Columbia University. She is a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study at the Technical University of Munich, Germany and a Director of the International Society for Computational Biology. 
The primary focus of Yana’s research is the concept of "function" in biology. Specifically, she is interested in understanding the origins and mechanisms of the molecular machinery that underpins life. She believes that machine learning (ML) holds great promise in deciphering these functional details. Accordingly, her long-term goal is to use the advances in ML and other computational techniques to gain a deeper understanding of how biological functionality is encoded in genomic data, whether on the level of individual genes, whole genomes, or metagenomes.