Bonnie Berger, a professor of applied mathematics and computer science at MIT and a principal investigator at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL), has been named a 2012 fellow of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB). The ISCB fellows program honors members that have distinguished themselves through outstanding contributions to the fields of computational biology and bioinformatics.

“ISCB fellows represent the absolute pillars of our community,” said Burkhard Rost, president of the ISCB. “I can imagine that the ISCB fellows will become an active group of the society, serving as a pool of experts that can help drive the scientific excellence of our field.”

At CSAIL, Berger leads the Computation and Biology Group and is a member of the Theory of Computation Group. Berger’s recent work focuses on designing algorithms to gain biological insights from advances in automated data collection and the subsequent large data sets drawn from them. She works on a diverse set of problems, including network inference, protein folding, compressive genomics and medical genomics. Additionally, she collaborates closely with biologists in order to design experiments to maximally leverage the power of computation for biological explorations.

After beginning her career working in algorithms at MIT, Berger was one of the pioneer researchers in the area of computational molecular biology. Berger has won numerous awards including a National Science Foundation Career Award, a Radcliffe Bunting Institute Science Scholarship and the Biophysical Society’s Dayhoff Award for research.

Berger and the six other individuals named to the ISCB fellows class of 2012 were recognized for their contributions to computational biology and bioinformatics at the ISCB members meeting on July 15. The ISCB is a not-for-profit scholarly society dedicated to advancing the scientific understanding of living systems through computation.