Pi Day Events Include Lecture by MIT’s Berger, Mar. 14 in Porter Bldg.
NIH will mark the occasion of Pi Day, Tuesday, Mar. 14, with a series of events celebrating the intersection between the quantitative and biomedical sciences. Pi Day is an annual international celebration of the irrational number Pi, 3.141592...
A highlight will be a lecture by Dr. Bonnie Berger, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, titled “Mathematics of Biomedical Data Science,” from 1 to 2 p.m. in Rm. 620/630 of the Porter Bldg. The last two decades have seen an exponential increase in genomic and biomedical data, which are outstripping advances in computing power. Extracting new science from these massive datasets will require not only faster computers; it will require algorithms that scale sublinearly in the size of the datasets.
Berger is the Simons professor of mathematics at MIT with a joint appointment in computer science. After beginning her career working in algorithms at MIT, she was one of the pioneer researchers in computational biology and, together with the many students she has mentored, has been instrumental in defining the field. She continues to lead efforts to design algorithms to gain biological insights from recent advances in automated data collection and the subsequent large data sets drawn from them. She has received numerous honors, including election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
View the full NIH Pi Day program at https://nihpiday.nih.gov/index.html.