Slonim named ISCB Fellow

In recognition of her leadership in computational biology research, Professor Donna Slonim of the Department of Computer Science was recently named a Fellow of The International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB). Slonim was selected as a Fellow based on her extensive contributions to the field, particularly her work using machine learning to better understand maternal and fetal health. She will be honored along with the other 2025 Fellows at the joint Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) and European Conference on Computational Biology in July.

Slonim earned her PhD at MIT and joined Tufts in 2005. Prior to Tufts, she worked on the Human Genome Project at the MIT/Whitehead Institute Center for Genome Research and as a principal scientist at Wyeth Research (formerly the Genetics Institute).

At Tufts, she holds a primary appointment in the Department of Computer Science and secondary appointments in the Department of Immunology at the Tufts School of Medicine and the Genetics, Molecular, and Cellular Biology Program at the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences. She co-directs the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Research Group at Tufts which brings together experts across disciplines to solve practical biomedical problems.

Her research centers on bioinformatics, with a focus on translational work related to human development. She develops methods for applying genomic data to the diagnosis and treatment of human disease and has been a pioneering advocate for using machine learning in transcriptomics and disease research.

Across her work, Slonim has made a clear, positive impact on human health. At the start of her career, she used gene expression to distinguish leukemia subtypes in the first proof-of-concept experiment that used genome-scale mRNA profiling to classify patients into clinically-relevant groups. She has developed innovative anomaly detection methods for characterizing rare or heterogeneous medical conditions, which she has applied to various conditions including autism spectrum disorders, Huntington’s disease, and COPD. Her work has made key contributions to understanding fetal development through maternal blood and the effects of maternal opioid use. Her most recent work introduces faster methods for inferring gene regulatory networks from single-cell sequencing data, allowing comparison of context-specific network changes in individual patients.   

In addition to her pioneering research, Slonim is a valued member of the computational biology community whose longstanding commitment to the field is evident through her leadership role in various conferences, academic journals, and advisory boards. She has served on the Board of Scientific Counselors for the National Library of Medicine and on the Scientific Advisory Boards of both the Gene Ontology and the Mouse Genome Database. She has twice served terms on the ISCB Board of Directors. In 2020, she was the Proceedings Co-Chair of Intelligent Systems in Molecular Biology (ISMB), the leading international computational biology conference. She has been an associate editor for PLOS Computational Biology since 2008 and has been an editorial board member of the Journal of Biomedical Informatics, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics and BMC Bioinformatics. 

The International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) was founded in 1997 to promote discovery and expand access to computational biology and bioinformatics globally. The Society brings together researchers, students, technicians, and practitioners from around the world who advance the scientific understanding of living systems through computation. ISCB Fellows have made outstanding contributions through leadership, research, and service over the course of their career.

Learn more about Professor Donna Slonim.