Sixth Annual Yip Lecture | Regina Barzilay: Can ML methods design drugs?
CMSA EVENTS
Sixth Annual Yip Lecture | Regina Barzilay: Can ML methods design drugs?
Date: April 23, 2026
Time: 4:00-5:00 pm ET
Location: Harvard Science Center Hall A
Speaker: Regina Barzilay, MIT
Title: Can ML methods design drugs?
Abstract: Today, life sciences are driven by prohibitively expensive wet lab experimentations, which limit the pace and scope of discovery. This talk focuses on AI algorithms that enable in-silico modeling of biological processes. Specifically, I will focus on algorithms for molecular and cellular modeling. I will highlight several successful examples where these algorithms have already transformed drug discovery. In the second part of the talk, I want to focus on problems where current methods fail to deliver as expected, motivating the need for algorithmic innovations.
Regina Barzilay is a Delta Electronics professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science 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. In 2017, she received a MacArthur fellowship, an ACL fellowship and an AAAI fellowship. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Columbia University, and spent a year as a postdoc at Cornell University.
The Yip Lecture takes place thanks to the support of Dr. Shing-Yiu Yip.
See CMSA webpage for more details