Professor Marina Meila has been appointed the Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Reliable Structure Discovery. Tier 1 Chairs are awarded to outstanding researchers recognized by their peers as world leaders in their fields. Each chair is valued at $200,000 annually for seven years and may be renewed for an additional seven-year term.
In addition to her appointment as a CRC, Professor Meila has received $100,000 in research infrastructure support through the Canada Foundation for Innovation John R. Evans Leaders Fund. The funding will provide computing resources to advance her research program, which focuses on developing mathematically and statistically grounded methods for discovering, validating and interpreting emergent structures in large datasets. The infrastructure includes a single-server system with 224 parallel CPUs organized around 12 TB of shared memory, a configuration designed to support large-scale computation and enable algorithms for reliable structure discovery to process emergent structures in datasets of up to 1 TB.
“Congratulations to Marina on her appointment as the Canada Research Chair in Reliable Structure Discovery,” said Raouf Boutaba, University Professor and Director of the Cheriton School of Computer Science. “The CRC and CFI-JELF support will help advance her innovative research in reliable and interpretable machine learning methods for scientific discovery.”
Marina Meila joined the Cheriton School of Computer Science as a Full Professor in July 2025 and was named a Canada CIFAR AI Chair in March 2026. Previously, she was a Full Professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of Washington. She has an MS in Electrical Engineering from the Polytechnic Institute of Bucharest and a PhD in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from MIT.
Read the full article on the Cheriton School of Computer Science's website.