About
My research lies on the intersection of AI and biomedicine. It focuses on developing new AI methods that can help us to drive new discoveries in biomedicine. In particular I am interested in developing methods that can help us to characterize our cells and understand how they function. At the same time, my interest lies in inspiring the development of new AI methods with the challenging problems that lie in biomedicine, thus advancing both fields.
Awards
- Early Career Award, SIB, 2023
- MIT Rising Star in EECS, MIT, 2021
- Josip Loncar Outstanding PhD Thesis Award, University of Zagreb, 2019
- Fulbright Scholar, US Government, 2018
- Women in Science Award, L’Oréal-UNESCO, 2018
Relevant Publications
- Vinas Torné, R., Wiatrak, M, Piran, Z., Fan, S., Jiang, L., Teichmann, S., Nitzan, M., Brbic, M. Systema: A Framework for Evaluating Genetic Perturbation Response Prediction beyond Systematic Variation (2025). Nature Biotechnology. 1-10. DOI:10.1038/s41587-025-02777-8
- Brbic, M., Cao, K., Hickey, J., Tan, Y., Snyder, M., Nolan, G., Leskovec, J. Annotation of Spatially Resolved Single-cell Data with STELLAR (2022). Nature Methods, 19, 1411–1418. DOI: 10.1038/s41592-022-01651-8
- Brbic, M., Zitnik, M., Wang, S., Pisco, A., Altman, R., Darmanis, S., Leskovec, J. MARS: Discovering Novel Cell Types across Heterogeneous Single-Cell Experiments (2020). Nature Methods, 17, 1200–1206. DOI: 10.1038/s41592-020-00979-3