New York- Gamze Gürsoy, PhD, Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia University, has been honoured 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 “Herbert Irving Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics” in the next three years.

Moreover, Irving Scholars select students whose research proposals reflect independent, well-developed scientific initiatives in clinical investigation. Gürsoy’s project title is “Overcoming Privacy Challenges in Machine Learning for Healthcare.”

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As a Core Faculty Member at the New York Genome Center (NYGC), Gürsoy focuses her research on biomedical data privacy, addressing the challenges of mass data in the current era and exploring opportunities to enhance 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?

Since launching in 1987, the program has honored more than 150 Irving Scholars. Gürsoy is the fourth member from the Department of Biomedical Informatics to receive this recognition