I was born in Bucharest, the capital of Romania. The word that best describes me is "Traveler" since I've been to places all over the world, living among different people and cultures. I have learnt that all of us are different and unique in our own ways and that tolerance can help us better share this world.

Since Aug 2005, I work with Siemens Healthcare near Philadeliphia, where I currently hold a Project/Product Manager as well as a Senior Staff Scientist position. I am an expert in the development of Data Mining / Machine Learning applications (natural language processing - NLP, bayesian networks, decision trees, neural nets, support vector machines) in Medical Informatics, with a special emphasis on both structured and unstructured (text) patient record mining as well as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data mining.

I have co-authored more than 30 scientific publications in some of the best US and International conferences and journals, across a variety of topics including Machine Learning / Data Mining, Medical Informatics and Mathematics. Additionally, I have 1 granted patent, 12 other filed patents, and 19 invention disclosures.

In 2005 I earned a Ph.D. degree from the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University, where my research was primarily focused on incorporating domain knowledge constraints in parameter estimation of Bayesian Networks. My advisor was professor Tom Mitchell (the Head of the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon) and the other members of my committee were Dr. Andrew Moore (Director of Google Pittsburgh), professor John Lafferty and Dr. Bharat Rao (Director of Knowledge Solutions at Siemens Medical). In May 2003 I received my M.Sc. degree from the same university.

A couple of additional highlights of my education include graduating best of my class with a BSc degree in Computer Science and Mathematics from the University of Bucharest (Romania) in 2000 and a Gold Medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad that took place in Bombay in 1996.

My brother, Florin, graduated from Harvard University and is currently a PhD student at Stanford.

Follow the links to see pictures of my parents, Rodica and Stefan.