Caroline Uhler, Ph.D.

Caroline Uhler is a core institute member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where she directs the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center and is a member of the Scientific Leadership Team. She is also the Andrew (1956) and Erna Viterbi Professor of Engineering in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society at MIT.

Massive data collection holds the promise of a better understanding of complex phenomena. An exciting opportunity in this regard stems from the growing availability of perturbation data (drugs, knockouts, overexpression, etc.) in single-cell biology. In order to obtain mechanistic insights from such data, a major challenge is the integration of different data modalities (transcriptomic, proteomic, structural, etc.). Uhler develops machine learning methods for integrating and translating between vastly different data modalities and inferring causal or regulatory relationships from such data. She is particularly interested in using these methods to gain mechanistic insights into the link between genome packing and regulation in health and disease.

Uhler is recognized as a creative and innovative researcher and teacher at the intersection of machine learning, statistics, and biology. She has received multiple prestigious career prizes including an NIH New Innovator Award, a Simons Investigator Award, a Sloan Research Fellowship, a Sofja Kovalevskaja Award, and an NSF Career Award.

Uhler holds an M.Sc. in mathematics, a B.Sc. in biology, and an M.Ed., all from the University of Zurich. She obtained her Ph.D. in statistics from UC Berkeley and then spent three years as an assistant professor at IST Austria before joining the faculty at MIT in 2015.