After her PhD, she spent a year as a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University.[7] She was appointed as Delta Electronics Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT in 2016.[8] She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2014, which prompted her to conduct research in oncology.[9] Barzilay won the MacArthur Fellowship in 2017.[10]
For her doctoral dissertation at Columbia University, she led the development of Newsblaster, which recognized stories from different news sources as being about the same basic subject, and then paraphrased elements from the stories to create a summary.[11]
In computational linguistics, Barzilay created algorithms that learned annotations from common languages (i.e. English) to analyze less understood languages.
Prompted by her experience with breast cancer, Barzilay is applying machine learning to oncology. She is collaborating with physicians and students to devise deep learning models that utilize images, text, and structured data to identify trends that affect early diagnosis, treatment, and disease prevention.[12]
MIT Jameel Clinic
In 2018, Barzilay was appointed faculty lead for AI at the new MIT Jameel Clinic, a research center in the field of AI health sciences, including disease detection, drug discovery, and the development of medical devices.[13][14] In 2020, she was part of the team—with fellow MIT Jameel Clinic faculty lead Professor James J. Collins—that announced the discovery through deep learning of halicin, the first new antibiotic compound for 30 years, which kills over 35 powerful bacteria, including antimicrobial-resistanttuberculosis, the superbug C. difficile, and two of the World Health Organization's top-three most deadly bacteria.[15][16][17] In 2020, Collins, Barzilay and the MIT Jameel Clinic were also awarded funding through The Audacious Project to expand on the discovery of halicin in using AI to respond to the antibiotic resistance crisis through the development of new classes of antibiotics.[18][19]
