MIT Jameel Clinic lead Regina Barzilay named to 2025 TIME100 AI list
Professor Regina Barzilay, faculty lead for artificial intelligence (AI) at the Jameel Clinic at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has been named in the 2025 TIME100 AI, the TIME magazine list recognising the 100 most influential people in AI.
To assemble the list, TIME’s editors and reporters examined the key stories in AI over the past year and consulted with expert sources and industry leaders for recommendations.
The result is a list of 100 leaders, innovators, shapers and thinkers who have a stake in the future of AI.
Professor Regina Barzilay, faculty lead for AI at the MIT Jameel Clinic, said: "It’s an honour to be recognised in the 2025 TIME100 AI list.
"I hope the work we’ve done at MIT highlights how AI can positively contribute to society by transforming health outcomes for patients around the world.”
Early in her career, Regina was one of the leading computational linguists, earning her a 2017 MacArthur 'genius' grant.
Following her diagnosis and subsequent recovery from breast cancer, her work shifted from using AI to translate lost languages to developing AI models for health, including predicting cancer risk and discovering new drugs.
This career pivot led her to develop a groundbreaking deep learning model called Mirai, which predicts breast cancer risk from a patient’s mammogram up to five years in advance.
Released in 2019 in partnership with researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), the model is now being deployed in over 60 hospitals across the globe.
Following Mirai’s release, Regina immediately teamed up with another group of researchers at MGH to develop a second groundbreaking risk prediction model, called Sybil.
Released in 2022, Sybil uses deep learning to predict six-year lung cancer risk from a patient’s low-dose computed tomography scan and is also being rolled out in hospitals worldwide.
Regina also joined efforts with Professor Jim Collins, her counterpart as the MIT Jameel Clinic faculty lead for life sciences, to screen over 100 million molecules with AI to discover halicin, the first AI-discovered antibiotic.
Their discovery, published in Cell in 2020, shook the scientific world by demonstrating that AI could be a viable tool for accelerating antibiotic discovery with a looming antimicrobial resistance crisis and an anemic antibiotic pipeline.
More recently, Regina oversaw the development of Boltz-1 and 2, the first open-source biomolecular structure prediction model to achieve AlphaFold3-level accuracy during a global race to release an open-source equivalent to AlphaFold3 for biomedical research and drug development.