Marinka Zitnik, PhD

Marinka Zitnik investigates machine learning for science and medicine. Her methods leverage biomedical data at the scale of billions of interactions among millions of entities, blend machine learning with statistics and data science, and infuse biomedical knowledge into deep learning. Problems she investigates are motivated by network biology and medicine, genomics, drug discovery, and health.

Dr. Zitnik's research vision is that in the future data science and artificial intelligence will be routinely used to give clinicians diagnostic recommendations; give scientists testable hypotheses they can confirm experimentally and offer them insights into safe and precise treatments; and give patients guidance on self-care, e.g., how to lead a healthy lifestyle and recognize disease early. To realize this vision, Dr. Zitnik develops methods to reason over rich interconnected data and translates the methods into solutions for biomedical problems.

Before joining Harvard, Dr. Zitnik was a postdoctoral fellow in Computer Science at Stanford University and was involved in projects at Chan Zuckerberg Biohub. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of Ljubljana while also researching at Imperial College London, University of Toronto, Baylor College of Medicine, and Stanford University. 

DBMI Research Areas

• Artificial Intelligence
• Biomedical Discovery Infrastructure
• Computational Omics

Current Postdoctoral Fellowship Opportunities

• Artificial Intelligence for Cancer Drug Discovery
• Representation learning and embeddings for biomedical networks and knowledge graphs