PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Madalina Fiterau

Also known as Ina Fiterau, Ina Fiterau Brostean

Madalina Fiterau is a machine learning researcher at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who builds hybrid models for medical data and co-authored Deep Neural Decision Forests, the 2015 Marr Prize paper that unified classification trees with deep convolutional networks. They earned a PhD in Machine Learning at Carnegie Mellon University in 2015 and worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford's Mobilize Center from 2015 to 2018. In 2018, they joined the College of Information and Computer Sciences at UMass Amherst, where they lead the Information Fusion Lab, and the UMass Board of Trustees granted them tenure in 2025. As of October 2026, they are an associate professor, on leave for Fall 2026.

Now at
Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences
Badges

Timeline

  1. 2009–2013

    Software engineering and Google internships

    They earn a BEng from Politehnica Timisoara in Romania in 2009 and start out as a software engineer. They intern at Google in 2011 and 2013.

  2. 2012–2015

    Machine learning PhD at CMU

    They earn a master's degree in Machine Learning at Carnegie Mellon University in 2012 and a PhD there in 2015. Artur Dubrawski, head of the Auton Lab, supervises the thesis, and they are a member of that lab.

  3. 2015

    Deep Neural Decision Forests

    They complete a research internship at Microsoft Research Cambridge with Peter Kontschieder and Samuel Rota-Buló. In 2015, they coauthor Deep Neural Decision Forests with Kontschieder, Antonio Criminisi and Rota Bulò, an ICCV paper that unifies classification trees with the representation learning of deep convolutional networks and trains them end to end. The paper wins the David Marr Prize at ICCV in 2015.

  4. 2015–2018

    Postdoc at Stanford's Mobilize Center

    From 2015 to 2018, they are a postdoctoral fellow in Stanford's Mobilize Center, working with professors Chris Ré and Scott Delp. In 2016, they receive the Star Research Award at the Annual Congress of the Society of Critical Care Medicine.

  5. 2018–2019

    The Information Fusion Lab

    They join the College of Information and Computer Sciences at UMass Amherst in September 2018 and lead the Information Fusion Lab, which develops hybrid models to predict clinical outcomes such as the onset of Alzheimer's disease or mortality in the ICU. In 2019, they speak at MLconf in New York City on hybrid methods for heterogeneous multimodal data.

  6. 2019–2023

    Research awards and an NIH R03

    They receive the Manning IALS Research Award in 2019 and an IALS Midigrant in 2022. In 2023, they win an Institute of Diversity Sciences Seed Grant and an R03 from the NIH.

  7. June 2025

    Tenure at UMass Amherst

    The UMass Board of Trustees grants tenure to Madalina Fiterau Brostean as associate professor at its quarterly meeting in June 2025.

  8. As of October 2026

    Associate professor at UMass Amherst

    They are an associate professor in the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences at UMass Amherst, on leave for Fall 2026. Their research areas are machine learning, artificial intelligence and health informatics.

Career

  1. Since 2018University of Massachusetts AmherstAssociate Professor
  2. Since 2018Manning College of Information and Computer SciencesDirector
  3. 2015Microsoft ResearchResearch Intern
  4. 2015–2018Stanford UniversityPostdoctoral Fellow
  5. 2011–2013GoogleIntern

Education

  1. 2015Carnegie Mellon UniversityPhD
  2. 2012Carnegie Mellon UniversityMaster's
  3. 2009Politehnica University of TimisoaraBEng

From the biography.

  1. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other universityIncludes Madalina Fiterau. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other university. We compare doctorate and 5+ year employment links, career timing and current workplaces for 187 major-prize and 1,111 best-paper winners.
  2. Of 943 people shaping AI who worked at Google, 446 work there nowIncludes Madalina Fiterau. Our estimates of where the 943 people shaping AI who worked at Google and Google DeepMind work now: 446 at Google and 452 across 278 other organizations.
  3. 23% of people shaping AI who left a university for a company later returned to a universityIncludes Madalina Fiterau. We estimate that 468 of the 2,011 people shaping AI who left a university for a company (23%) later returned to a university after a median of 5 years, and 163 of 829 (20%) made the reverse round trip.
  4. Universities keep AI researchers for a median of 6 years, compared with 2 years at frontier labsIncludes University of Massachusetts Amherst. Across 15,811 dated work stays (6,529 people), median role tenure runs from 6 years at universities to 2 years at frontier labs. We compare all five organization types, starting decades from the 1970s to the 2020s, and the organizations that keep people longest.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Madalina Fiterau yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Carbonite Chamber #17 cs.cmu.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  2. Ina Fiterau Brostean : Manning College of Information & Computer Sciences : UMass Amherst cics.umass.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  3. ICCV 2015 Open Access Repository: Deep Neural Decision Forests openaccess.thecvf.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  4. Deep Neural Decision Forests [Winner of the David Marr Prize 2015] - Microsoft Research microsoft.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  5. Ina Fiterau - Home people.cs.umass.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  6. Madalina Fiterau | MLconf - The Machine Learning Conference mlconf.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  7. Madalina Fiterau | Computational Social Science Institute cssi.umass.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  8. Board of Trustees Awards Tenure to Seven CICS Faculty Members : Manning College of Information & Computer Sciences : UMass Amherst cics.umass.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.