Yana Bromberg

Yana Bromberg is an American computational biologist and professor of bioinformatics at Emory University. She is recognized as a pioneer in applying machine learning for genomic analysis, particularly for developing SNAP (Screening for Non-Acceptable Polymorphisms), a neural network-based method that predicts functional effects of single amino acid substitutions, resulting from missense SNPs, on protein function. Her current research focuses on understanding how protein language model (pLM) embeddings capture biological information and whether these computational representations truly encode the underlying principles of molecular biology.

Early life and education Yana Bromberg was born in Odessa, Ukraine and moved to Brooklyn, New York, in 1992 (published in 2007), developed as part of her doctoral work, was one of the first tools to use neural networks for the analysis of genomic variants (here, non-synonymous SNPs). Her lab had since developed SynVep, a machine learning-based predictor for evaluating the impact of synonymous variants. Recently, the Bromberglab had demonstrated that unsupervised pLMs can be used to predict variant effects as well as earlier, supervised methods, albeit no existing model attains perfect understanding of variant impact.

A central theme of her recent work is investigating what biological information is captured by pLMs. To this end, her lab has developed the RNS method to quantify the uncertainty in protein representations, indicative of their ability to genuinely encode protein biology.

Awards and honours Bromberg was awarded a National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2016. She was then named a Hans Fischer Fellows by the Technical University of Munich TUM Institute for Advanced Study (2014-2017). Other honors include the Theobald Smith Society Young Investigator Award (2016) and the Rutgers Board of Trustees Research Fellowship for Scholarly Excellence (2016),

In 2025, Bromberg was named by the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) as an ISCB Fellow.

Selected talks "The Big YOU: Defining 'you' on the Microbial Level" - TEDxRutgers (2019) "Yana Bromberg on getting creative with machine learning" - Night Science Podcast (June 2021) Function SIG presentation - ISMB/ECCB 2023, Lyon, France (July 2023) 3DSIG presentation - ISMB 2024, Montreal, Canada (July 2024)