Regina Barzilay, School of Engineering Distinguished Professor for AI and Health at MIT, CSAIL Principal Investigator, and Jameel Clinic AI Faculty Lead, has been awarded the 2025 Frances E. Allen Medal from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Barzilay’s award recognizes the impact of her machine-learning algorithms on medicine and natural language processing.
The IEEE has awarded the Allen Medal annually since 2022, recognizing computer science researchers who have advanced society, science, or technology. The prize is named after Frances Allen, a computing researcher who made key contributions to optimizing compilers – a technology that alters programs to run more efficiently.
Barzilay has melded the predictive capabilities of machine learning with chemistry and oncology. She works on machine learning algorithms for modeling molecular properties in the context of drug design, with the goal of elucidating disease biochemistry and accelerating the development of new therapeutics. In the field of clinical AI, she focuses on algorithms for early cancer diagnostics.
One impactful example of her work is the discovery of potent antibiotics that can effectively kill many drug-resistant bacteria. Her recent work focuses on modeling molecular interactions, protein engineering, and developing therapeutics resistant to resistance. One of her group’s recent innovations is Boltz, an open-source implementation of AlphaFold 3 that facilitates open access to advanced biomolecular structure prediction.
Barzilay led the development of AI tools that can assess a patient's risk of developing cancer up to six years in advance, including MIRAI for breast cancer and Sybil for lung cancer. To facilitate clinical use of these tools, she founded the Jameel Clinic Hospital Network, which includes 65 hospitals in 24 countries. Her MIRAI system has already been used to read 1.7 million mammograms within these health facilities — and based on this deployment, she is working on tools that support the safe deployment of AI tools in healthcare systems.
Barzilay is a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), the National Academy of Medicine (NAM), and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS). She has earned the MacArthur Fellowship, MIT’s Jamieson Award for excellence in teaching, and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence’s (AAAI) $1 million Squirrel AI Award for Artificial Intelligence for the Benefit of Humanity. Barzilay is a fellow of AAAI, ACL, and AIMBE.
