Dina Zielinski

Athlete, Concerned citizen, Scientist, World traveler

Dina Zielinski is a molecular and computational biologist based in Paris. Most of her research has been in human genetics and genomics, from decoding mutations in cancer and rare diseases to encoding digital data in DNA. She studied biology and French at NYU where she received her bachelor’s degree. Dina started her career as a molecular biologist at the Whitehead Institute/MIT where she worked on bridging molecular and computational strategies in human genetics. Later, she moved to the New York Genome Center and Columbia University where she was inspired to focus on bioinformatics to bring biological data to life. While at the Institut Curie, she completed her MSc in bioinformatics at Université Paris Cité, followed by a PhD in genomics and biomedical informatics at Sorbonne Université. She is currently a senior scientist at the French National Institute of Health (Inserm) where she applies machine learning approaches to improve human health. Dina was selected as a 2020 National Academy of Sciences Kavli Frontiers of Science Fellow. Her work has been profiled by The Atlantic, BBC, Forbes, NPR, STAT, Wall Street Journal, and WIRED, and her TEDxVienna talk on DNA Storage, published on TED.com, has received nearly 2 million views.