Maria Brbic

Maria Brbic is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at EPFL, previously a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University under Jure Leskovec. Her research focuses on developing machine learning methods for biological and biomedical applications, particularly representation learning of high-dimensional datasets, open-world semi-supervised learning, and single-cell genomics.

Her work includes the STELLAR method for spatial cell type discovery (Nature Methods 2022), the ORCA framework for open-world learning (ICLR 2022), and contributions to the Fly Cell Atlas (Science 2022). She is involved in the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub and Neuro-omics projects.

She received the University of Zagreb's best thesis award, was recognized as a MIT Rising Star in EECS, and won the Basel Computational Biology Conference best poster award. Her research bridges computer science with cutting-edge biomedical discovery.