Bonnie Berger

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Bonnie Anne Berger (born 1964 or 1965 ) is an American applied mathematician and computer scientist, and one of the founding researchers of computational molecular biology. She is the Simons Professor of Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she leads the Computation and Biology group at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Her research spans algorithms, bioinformatics , genomics, structural biology, and genomic privacy; landmark contributions include the first comparative human-mouse genome analysis , coiled coil protein structure prediction Her paternal grandfather was a Jewish immigrant who came to the United States from Russia at the beginning of World War I, and her father was a businessman and classically trained pianist while her mother served as head of the Jewish Education Service of North America. Growing up, she spoke Spanish and studied Hebrew, becoming fluent after spending several months in Israel, and later studied Russian at university. At Brandeis she initially declared majors in Russian and then psychology before discovering an interest in coding through a class on statistical programming in Fortran, after which she switched to the university's new computer science program.

After completing her PhD, Berger remained at MIT for postdoctoral research. Her postdoctoral advisor Daniel Kleitman, a professor of applied mathematics, introduced her to problems in computational biology after hearing Stanford biophysicist Michael Levitt speak on protein folding, prompting Berger to shift her focus toward biology. Her former doctoral students include Serafim Batzoglou, and chair of the steering committee for RECOMB. As ISCB vice president, she ran workshops on gender inequality in 2016 and worked to increase the representation of women and underrepresented minorities among ISCB fellows and awardees. She serves on the Executive Editorial Board of the Journal of Computational Biology and on the editorial boards of Annual Review for Biomedical Data Science, Genome Biology, Bioinformatics, IEEE/ACM TCBB, and Cell Systems. 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 of 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 an Honorary Doctorate from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). She serves as a Member-at-Large of the Section on Mathematics at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). She was awarded the ISCB Accomplishment by a Senior Scientist Award in 2019. and 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 Berger is married to MIT professor and CEO of Akamai Technologies F. Thomson Leighton. She has described reducing her publication output during a period in the middle of her career while raising her children, and said she returned to full productivity around 2009.