Anna Goldenberg is a Russian-born computer scientist and a full professor at

University of Toronto The University of Toronto (UToronto or U of T) is a public university, public research university whose main campus is located on the grounds that surround Queen's Park (Toronto), Queen's Park in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It was founded by ...

's Department of Computer Science and the Department of Statistics, a senior scientist at the Hospital for Sick Children's Research Institute and the Associate Research Director for health at the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence. She is the first chair in biomedical informatics and artificial intelligence at the Hospital for Sick Children.

Early life and education

As a young child born and raised in

Voronezh Voronezh ( ; , ) is a city and the administrative centre of Voronezh Oblast in southwestern Russia straddling the Voronezh River, located from where it flows into the Don River. The city sits on the Southeastern Railway, which connects wes ...

, Russia, Goldenberg faced

antisemitism Antisemitism or Jew-hatred is hostility to, prejudice towards, or discrimination against Jews. A person who harbours it is called an antisemite. Whether antisemitism is considered a form of racism depends on the school of thought. Antisemi ...

in school. Eventually, in 1995, when she was 17 years old, Goldenberg's family left Russia and moved to

Kentucky Kentucky (, ), officially the Commonwealth of Kentucky, is a landlocked U.S. state, state in the Southeastern United States, Southeastern region of the United States. It borders Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio to the north, West Virginia to the ...

, U.S.A. There, Goldenberg completed a

Bachelor of Engineering A Bachelor of Engineering (BEng) or a Bachelor of Science in Engineering (BSE) is an undergraduate academic degree awarded to a college graduate majoring in an engineering discipline at a higher education institution. In the United Kingdom, a Ba ...

degree, in Engineering Mathematics and Computer Science, at the

University of Louisville The University of Louisville (UofL) is a public university, public research university in Louisville, Kentucky, United States. It is part of the Kentucky state university system. Chartered in 1798 as the Jefferson Seminary, it became in the 19t ...

. Goldenberg completed a Master's in Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining, followed by a PhD in

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of study in artificial intelligence concerned with the development and study of Computational statistics, statistical algorithms that can learn from data and generalise to unseen data, and thus perform Task ( ...

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. The institution was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools. In 1912, it became the Carnegie Institu ...

Pittsburgh Pittsburgh ( ) is a city in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, United States, and its county seat. It is the List of municipalities in Pennsylvania#Municipalities, second-most populous city in Pennsylvania (after Philadelphia) and the List of Un ...

, where her thesis explored scalable graphical models for social networks. While in graduate school, Goldenberg was close with Joyce Feinberg - who was later one of 11 victims killed in the Pittsburgh's Tree of Life synagogue shooting in October 2018.

Research career

Goldenberg moved to Canada in 2008 as a

post-doctoral fellow A postdoctoral fellow, postdoctoral researcher, or simply postdoc, is a person professionally conducting research after the completion of their doctoral studies (typically a PhD). Postdocs most commonly, but not always, have a temporary acade ...

. She is currently appointed as an associate professor at

's Department of Computer Science and the Department of Statistics and a scientist at the Hospital for Sick Children's Research Institute. Her laboratory explores how machine learning can be used to map the heterogeneity seen in various human diseases - specifically to develop methodologies to identify patterns in collected data and improve patient outcomes. She has more than 50 publications in peer-reviewed journals. Similarity Network Fusion, a networking method devised by her research group is the first data integration method developed to integrate patient data which improved survival outcome predictions in different cancers. She has an

h-index The ''h''-index is an author-level metric that measures both the productivity and citation impact of the publications, initially used for an individual scientist or scholar. The ''h''-index correlates with success indicators such as winning t ...

of 17, and her research has been cited over 2,000 times. In 2017, Goldenberg was appointed as a new Tier 2 CIHR-funded

Canada Research Chair Canada Research Chair (CRC) is a title given to certain Canadian university research professors by the Canada Research Chairs Program. Program goals The Canada Research Chair program was established in 2000 as a part of the Government of Canada ...

in Computational Medicine at the University of Toronto. On 15 January 2019, Goldenberg was named the first chair in

biomedical informatics Health informatics combines communications, information technology (IT), and health care to enhance patient care and is at the forefront of the medical technological revolution. It can be viewed as a branch of engineering and applied science. ...

and artificial intelligence at the Hospital for Sick Children, which is the first of its kind to exist in a Canadian children's hospital. This position is partially funded by a $1.75 million donation from Amar Varma (a Toronto entrepreneur whose newborn son underwent surgery at the Hospital for Sick Children).

Selected bibliography

* Anna Goldenberg,

Galit Shmueli Galit Shmueli () is a data scientist who works in Taiwan as Tsing Hua Distinguished Professor at the Institute of Service Science, National Tsing Hua University. She is the author of many textbooks in business statistics and is known for her wo ...

, Richard A Caruana, Stephen E Fienberg. Early statistical detection of anthrax outbreaks by tracking over-the-counter medication sales.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ''Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America'' (often abbreviated ''PNAS'' or ''PNAS USA'') is a peer-reviewed multidisciplinary scientific journal. It is the official journal of the National Academy of Scie ...

. 2002. * Anna Goldenberg, Alice X Zheng, Stephen E Fienberg, Edoardo M Airoldi. A survey of statistical network models. Foundations and Trends in Machine Learning. 2010. * Aziz M Mezlini, Eric JM Smith, Marc Fiume, Orion Buske, Gleb L Savich, Sohrab Shah, Sam Aparicio, Derek Y Chiang, Anna Goldenberg, Michael Brudno. iReckon: simultaneous isoform discovery and abundance estimation from RNA-seq data.

Genome Research ''Genome Research'' is a peer-reviewed scientific journal published by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press. Disregarding review journals, Genome Research ranks 2nd in the category 'Genetics and Genomics' after Nature Genetics. The focus of the j ...

. 2013. * Bo Wang, Aziz M Mezlini, Feyyaz Demir, Marc Fiume, Zhuowen Tu, Michael Brudno, Benjamin Haibe-Kains, Anna Goldenberg. Similarity network fusion for aggregating data types on a genomic scale.

Nature Methods ''Nature Methods'' is a monthly peer-reviewed scientific journal covering new scientific techniques. It was established in 2004 and is published by Springer Nature under the Nature Portfolio. Like other ''Nature'' journals, there is no external edi ...

. 2014.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Goldenberg, Anna Russian expatriates in the United States People from Voronezh Academic staff of the University of Toronto Year of birth missing (living people) Living people Canadian women computer scientists Canadian computer scientists University of Louisville alumni Carnegie Mellon University alumni Russian emigrants to Canada Jewish Russian scientists Jewish women scientists Canada Research Chairs