Maria Skoularidou receives Blackwell-Rosenbluth Award

The Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard is excited to announce that postdoctoral fellow Maria Skoularidou was awarded the 2023 Blackwell-Rosenbluth Award earlier this month. The Blackwell-Rosenbluth Award is granted to outstanding young researchers in the field of Bayesian statistics. 

Skoularidou joined the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center in September, 2023. She is co-advised by Nikos Daskalakis, director of the Neurogenomics and Translational Bioinformatics Laboratory at McLean Hospital and an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, and Costis Daskalakis, a professor in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a member of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Her research focuses on developing scalable and efficient computational methods to detect epigenetic effects in diverse trauma and PTSD contexts through employing information from various datasets.

Skoularidou holds a PhD in biostatistics from the University of Cambridge, where she was advised by Sylvia Richardson. Skoularidou has a four-year degree in informatics and a Master’s of Science in statistical science from the Athens University of Economics and Business. She founded (Dis)Ability in AI, a group that supports and advocates for disabled people’s needs at machine learning conferences and other venues, and is on the editorial board of ACM Transactions on Probabilistic Machine Learning. 

“Maria has already made impressive contributions to the field of Bayesian inference as well as generative modeling and its applications to biomedical data,” said Caroline Uhler, director of the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center, a core member of the Broad Institute, and a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Institute for Data, Systems and Society at MIT. “We’re excited to see what she’ll continue to accomplish as a Schmidt Center fellow.”