Regina Barzilay is a School of Engineering Distinguished Professor for AI and Health in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research interests are in natural language processing, applications of deep learning to chemistry and oncology. She is a recipient of various awards including the NSF Career Award, the MIT Technology Review TR-35 Award, Microsoft Faculty Fellowship and several Best Paper Awards at NAACL and ACL. In 2017, she received a MacArthur fellowship, an ACL fellowship and an AAAI fellowship. In 2020, she was the first recipient of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence's new Squirrel AI Award for Artificial Intelligence for the Benefit of Humanity, a $1 million award given to honor individuals whose work in the field has had a transformative impact on society, for her work developing machine learning models to develop antibiotics and other drugs, and to detect and diagnose breast cancer at early stages.