Caroline Uhler

Caroline Uhler is an MIT professor whose machine-learning research applies causal methods to biological and genomic questions. She earned degrees in mathematics, biology, and mathematics education at the University of Zurich, completed a statistics PhD at UC Berkeley in 2011, and joined MIT after research posts in Austria, Minnesota, and Zurich. She received a 2019 Simons Investigator award. Her work includes methods for selecting genetic experiments and Image2Reg, which predicts genetic perturbations from chromatin images. As of October 2026, she directs the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center at the Broad Institute.

Now at: Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Broad Institute
Works: 211
Citations: 4,229
h-index: 30
Badges: Wayfarer

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 19 October 2026.

Timeline

By 2011

From Zurich to Berkeley

She earns degrees in mathematics, biology, and high-school mathematics education at the University of Zurich, then completes a statistics doctorate at UC Berkeley in 2011 under Bernd Sturmfels.
2011–2015

Moving from IST to MIT

She joins IST Austria in 2011 and spends three years as an assistant professor there before joining MIT faculty in EECS and IDSS in 2015. She also holds short postdoctoral positions at the University of Minnesota and ETH Zurich before MIT.
2015

A START Prize for graphical models

She receives Austria's 2015 START Prize for a project on probabilistic graphical models.
2019

A Simons Investigator Award

She becomes a 2019 Simons Investigator in the Mathematical Modeling of Living Systems category.
2023

Planning genetic interventions

In 2023, she is co-senior author on a computational method that identifies optimal genetic perturbations with fewer experiments. The authors apply the algorithms to biological data designed to mimic cellular reprogramming.
2025

Predicting perturbations from images

She and collaborators develop Image2Reg, a machine-learning model that uses chromatin images to predict genetic perturbations the model has not seen before and connects chromatin organization to gene regulation.
February 2026

Representing cell measurements

She is senior author of a Nature Computational Science paper that encodes overlapping cell measurements in a shared representation space and modality-specific measurements in separate spaces.
As of October 2026

Directing the Schmidt Center

She is the Andrew (1956) and Erna Viterbi Professor of Engineering at MIT and directs the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center at the Broad Institute. She is also a core institute member at Broad.