Bonnie Berger

Bonnie Anne Berger (born 1965 (age 34) ) is an American mathematician and computer scientist, who works as the Simons professor of mathematics and professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the head of the Computation and Biology group at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Her research interests are in algorithms, bioinformatics and computational molecular biology.

Education
Berger did her undergraduate studies at Brandeis University, and earned her doctorate from MIT in 1990 under the supervision of Silvio Micali. As a student, she won the Machtey Award in 1989 for a paper on parallel algorithms that she published with fellow student John Rompel at the Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science.

Career and research
After completing her PhD, Berger remained at MIT for postdoctoral research where she became a faculty member in 1992. Her research in bioinformatics has been published in leading peer reviewed scientific journals including Science, the Journal of Algorithms.  Her former doctoral students include Serafim Batzoglou, Lior Pachter, Mona Singh, Manolis Kellis, and Phil Bradley.

Berger has served as vice president of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) and chair of the steering committee for RECOMB.

Awards and honours
Berger was the 1997 winner of the Margaret Oakley Dayhoff Award. In 1998 she was an Invited Speaker of the International Congress of Mathematicians in Berlin (but she was unable to make a personal appearance). In 1999, Berger was included in a list of 100 top innovators published by Technology Review. In 2003, Berger became a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and in 2012 she became an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a fellow the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB). In 2016, Berger was inducted into the college of fellows of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE). She was included in the 2019 class of fellows of the American Mathematical Society "for contributions to computational biology, bioinformatics, algorithms and for mentoring". She also received the Honorary Doctorate at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). She serves as a Member-at-Large of the Section on Mathematics at American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). She was awarded the ISCB Accomplishment by a Senior Scientist Award in 2019. In 2020 she gave the AWM-SIAM Sonia Kovalevsky Lecture, and additionally was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. She was elected as a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, in the 2022 Class of SIAM Fellows, "for pioneering work in computational molecular biology, including comparative and compressive genomics, network inference, genomic privacy, and protein structure prediction".

Personal life
She is married to MIT professor and CEO of Akamai Technologies F. Thomson Leighton.