Bianca M Dumitrascu, PhD

Bianca Dumitrascu joined Columbia University in the Spring 2023 as an Assistant Professor of Statistics and Herbert and Florence Irving Assistant Professor of Cancer Data Research (in the Herbert and Florence Institute for Cancer Dynamics and in the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center).

Before joining Columbia, Bianca was an Affiliated Lecturer and a Departmental Early Career Fellow in the Department of Computer Science and Technology at the University of Cambridge. Previously, she was a Member of the School of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study. She earned her PhD in Computational Biology at Princeton University, focusing on experimental design in single-cell gene expression studies and methods for high-dimensional medical and genomic data, and completed her undergraduate studies in Mathematics at MIT.

Bianca leads the Computational Morphogenesis Lab where her research bridges machine learning and genetics to uncover how molecular interactions shape emergent patterns in biological systems. Inspired by the processes of regeneration and wound healing, she develops computational methods with roots in statistics, graph neural networks, domain adaptation, and active learning to advance understanding in spatial transcriptomics and cellular development. Her work sheds light on how cells coordinate and adapt in response to injury or during early developmental processes.