Anna Goldenberg facts for kids

Anna Goldenberg is a Russian-born computer scientist and a full professor at University of Toronto'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, Russia, Goldenberg faced antisemitism in school. Eventually, in 1995, when she was 17 years old, Goldenberg's family left Russia and moved to Kentucky, U.S.A. There, Goldenberg completed a Bachelor of Engineering degree, in Engineering Mathematics and Computer Science, at the University of Louisville.

Goldenberg completed a Master's in Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining, followed by a PhD in machine learning at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, 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. She is currently appointed as an associate professor at University of Toronto'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 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 in Computational Medicine at the University of Toronto.

On 15 January 2019, Goldenberg was named the first chair in biomedical informatics 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).