Yana Bromberg
Dr Yana Bromberg is Professor in the Departments of Biology and Computer Science at Emory University, a Principal Fellow of the Emory Center for AI Learning, and an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech. She was recently elected a Fellow of the International Society for Computational Biology in 2025 and serves on its Board of Directors. Dr Bromberg earned her Ph.D. in Biomedical Informatics from Columbia University in 2007 and is a Hans Fischer Fellow at TU Munich’s Institute for Advanced Study.
The primary focus of Dr Bromberg’s research is the concept of ‘function’ in biology: how biological functionality is encoded in genomic data, whether by a single gene, a genome, or a metagenome. Since before it was “cool” her lab has been building machine-learning and AI methods to make sense of genome and metagenome data, with work in precision medicine, environmental microbiome analysis, and origins of life. Tools developed in her lab span variant-effect prediction and whole genome analysis for disease predisposition, microbiome functional annotation, and, more recently, pretrained DNA and protein language models for reference-free function discovery. She also recently testified before the U.S. National Academy of Sciences on AI and biosecurity and co-let the Asilomar AI + Biotech working group.