Maria Brbic is Assistant Professor of Computer Science and, by courtesy, Life Sciences at the École Polytechnique Fédéral de Lausanne (EPFL). She develops new machine-learning methods and applies these to advance biology and biomedicine. Her methods have been used by global cell atlas consortia such as the Human BioMolecular Atlas Program (HuBMAP) and the Fly Cell Atlas consortium in their efforts to create reference maps of all cell types, which have the potential to transform biomedicine. Prior to joining the EPFL faculty in 2022, Maria was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University’s Department of Computer Science and a member of the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub at Stanford. Maria received her PhD from the University of Zagreb in 2019, while also researching at Stanford University as a Fulbright Scholar and at the University of Tokyo. Among other awards and recognitions, she was named a rising star in EECS by MIT in 2021 and she received the Early Career Bioinformatics Award from SIB in 2023.