Daphne Koller named MacArthur Fellow Daphne Koller named MacArthur Fellow (October 06, 2004)

Daphne Koller of Portola Valley, an associate professor of computer science at Stanford, has been named one of this year's MacArthur Fellows.

Ms. Koller, whose work focuses on the use of computational methods to resolve uncertainty in complex information sets, is one of 23 people honored this year by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Fellows receive a $500,000 grant over five years to use in any way they see fit.

Ms. Koller said she hopes to resolve "the complex network of interactions between many genes, proteins, metabolites and signals" using computational modeling.

Asked what she plans to do with the award, Ms. Koller said, "It's really a major decision, and they give you some time to think about it."

Ms. Koller received her bachelor's (1985) and master's (1986) degrees from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, followed by a doctorate (1993) from Stanford. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California-Berkeley from 1993 to 1995, after which she joined the Stanford Department of Computer Science as an assistant professor. In 2001, she was named an associate professor.

Her work has appeared in such publications as Science, Nature Genetics, Artificial Intelligence, Bioinformatics and Games. Information on her research group is at http://dags.stanford.edu/.

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