Marinka Zitnik

Marinka Zitnik is an Associate Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School, Associate Faculty at the Kempner Institute for the Study of Natural and Artificial Intelligence at Harvard University, and an Associate Member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Dr. Zitnik investigates AI and machine learning to advance scientific discovery, particularly in medicine, drug development, and genomic research, with the goal of enabling AI to learn and innovate on its own.

 

Dr. Zitnik leads a team of scientists in her lab that is developing an agentic AI system designed to work alongside researchers throughout the scientific discovery process. The work builds on other AI tools developed at Harvard, including Dr. Zitnik’s ToolUniverse. As Team Lead of AURORA, Dr. Zitnik will oversee the evaluation of AI co-scientists across ongoing research into next-generation CAR T-cell therapies, cancer initiation, and tumour-immune interactions.