Donna Slonim

Donna Slonim graduated from Yale College in 1990 with a major in Computer Science and as many credits in English. She received her M.S. in Computer Science from Berkeley in 1991, and then moved to the Theory of Computation group at the MIT Laboratory of Computer Science, where she studied computational learning theory with advisor Ron Rivest.

Early in her graduate career, Donna took a course in Computational Biology. The computational problems inherent in genomic mapping, an important first step of the Human Genome Project, inspired her to apply her algorithmic and machine learning expertise to this practical challenge. The summer job she took at the MIT / Whitehead Institute Center for Genome Research (WICGR) in 1994 never really ended, though she completed her Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1996. Her thesis includes formal computational models of machine learning as well as the algorithms used to build the first large-scale integrated maps of the entire human genome.

After graduation, Donna formally joined the research staff of the MIT/WICGR as a postdoctoral associate leading the mapping informatics group. She worked on maps of the mouse and rat genomes as well as the human. She then joined the Cancer Genomics group, where she developed methods for analyzing data from the then-new expression microarray technology. Her work there led to the first paper showing that expression data could be used to classify cancer in a clincally relevant fashion.

In 2000, Donna moved to Genetics Institute (which later became Wyeth Research) in Cambridge, MA, where she worked on developing novel methods of analyzing gene expression data and applying these techniques to the support and analysis of pharmacogenomics in clinical trials.

Jointly recruited by the Engineering and Medical Schools at Tufts, Donna was appointed as an Associate Professor of Computer Science in January, 2005, and she holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Pathology at Tufts University School of Medicine. She returns to academia eager to combine her practical drug-development expertise with her quest for better applications of genomic data to the diagnosis and treatment of human disease.

	Donna Slonim

Home Biography Research Publications Teaching	Donna Slonim graduated from Yale College in 1990 with a major in Computer Science and as many credits in English. She received her M.S. in Computer Science from Berkeley in 1991, and then moved to the Theory of Computation group at the MIT Laboratory of Computer Science, where she studied computational learning theory with advisor Ron Rivest. Early in her graduate career, Donna took a course in Computational Biology. The computational problems inherent in genomic mapping, an important first step of the Human Genome Project, inspired her to apply her algorithmic and machine learning expertise to this practical challenge. The summer job she took at the MIT / Whitehead Institute Center for Genome Research (WICGR) in 1994 never really ended, though she completed her Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1996. Her thesis includes formal computational models of machine learning as well as the algorithms used to build the first large-scale integrated maps of the entire human genome. After graduation, Donna formally joined the research staff of the MIT/WICGR as a postdoctoral associate leading the mapping informatics group. She worked on maps of the mouse and rat genomes as well as the human. She then joined the Cancer Genomics group, where she developed methods for analyzing data from the then-new expression microarray technology. Her work there led to the first paper showing that expression data could be used to classify cancer in a clincally relevant fashion. In 2000, Donna moved to Genetics Institute (which later became Wyeth Research) in Cambridge, MA, where she worked on developing novel methods of analyzing gene expression data and applying these techniques to the support and analysis of pharmacogenomics in clinical trials. Jointly recruited by the Engineering and Medical Schools at Tufts, Donna was appointed as an Associate Professor of Computer Science in January, 2005, and she holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Pathology at Tufts University School of Medicine. She returns to academia eager to combine her practical drug-development expertise with her quest for better applications of genomic data to the diagnosis and treatment of human disease.