Gürsoy Named Irving Scholar for Research Focused on Overcoming Privacy Challenges in Machine Learning for Healthcare

Gamze Gürsoy, PhD, Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia University, has been honored as a Herbert and Florence Irving Scholar for the 2024-2027 cohort.

In the late 1980’s, Herbert and Florence Irving created a generous endowment to support clinical and translational research at the Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons (VP&S) at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center (CUIMC). Part of this endowment supports awards of $180,000 unrestricted funds as Florence and Herbert Irving clinical research career awards (“Irving Scholars”) for junior faculty members involved in clinical and translational research. The scholarship also comes with a named professorship. Gürsoy will have the title of

Gamze Gürsoy presented at a recent Afternoon of Science series focused o the Department of Biomedical Informatics.

“Herbert Irving Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics” in the next three years.

Irving Scholars are selected on the basis of research proposals that reflect independent, well-developed scientific initiative in clinical investigation. Gürsoy’s project title is “Overcoming Privacy Challenges in Machine Learning for Healthcare.”

A Core Faculty Member at the New York Genome Center, Gürsoy focuses her research around biomedical data privacy — both the challenges being faced around the era of mass data, as well as the opportunities available to aid biomedical data science through the responsible sharing of healthcare data. Her lab collaborates on harmonizing diverse fields such as biology, bioinformatics, molecular biology, engineering, and cryptography to answer fundamental questions such as: (1) What are the metrics to quantify hidden information leakage? and (2) What are the innovative methodologies for privacy-preserving AI with biomedical data?

There have been more than 150 Irving Scholars since the program was launched in 1987, and Gürsoy is the fourth member of the Department of Biomedical Informatics to achieve this honor. The others are Chunhua Weng (2010-13), Nicholas Tatonetti (2015-2018) and Lena Mamykina (2017-2020).

Read more about Gürsoy’s research, or visit her lab page to learn more about her team’s ongoing work. 

Learn more about all four new Herbert and Florence Irving Scholars for the 2024-2027 cohort.