Anna Goldenberg is a Russian-born computer scientist and an associate professor at University of Toronto 's Department of Computer Science and the Department of Statistics , a senior scientist at the Hospital for Sick Children 's Research Institute and the Associate Research Director for health at the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence . She is the first chair in biomedical informatics and artificial intelligence at the Hospital for Sick Children . As a young child born and raised in Voronezh , Russia , Goldenberg faced antisemitism in school . Eventually , in 1995 , when she was 17 years old , Goldenberg 's family left Russia and moved to Kentucky , U.S.A. There , Goldenberg completed a Bachelor of Engineering degree , in Engineering Mathematics and Computer Science , at the University of Louisville . Goldenberg completed a Master 's in Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining , followed by a PhD in machine learning at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh , where her thesis explored scalable graphical models for social networks . While in graduate school , Goldenberg was close with Joyce Feinberg - who was later one of 11 victims killed in the Pittsburgh ’s Tree of Life synagogue shooting in October 2018
Pittsburgh ’s Tree of Life synagogue shooting
Pittsburgh synagogue shooting
Anna Goldenberg