Nina Miolane, Ph.D. received her M.S. in mathematics from Ecole Polytechnique (France) & Imperial College (UK), and her Ph.D. in computer science from INRIA (France) in collaboration with Stanford University. She was an instructor in the French Army and was decorated for succeeding in a commando training program. After her studies, Nina was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, and worked as a deep learning software engineer in the Silicon Valley.
At UCSB, Miolane directs the BioShape Lab, whose goal is to explore the "geometries of life." She investigates how the shapes of proteins, cells, and organs relate to their biological functions, how abnormal shape changes correlate with pathologies, and how these findings can help design new automatic diagnosis tools. Beyond the tangible shapes of the physical world, her team also explores the shapes of data by developing geometric and topological methods for biological and artificial intelligence. In this context, her lab co-develops the open-source packages: Geomstats, and TopoX with the PyT-team.
Research fundings include an NSF Career Award, an NIH R01 grant, a NSF SCALE MoDL grant, Google Season of Code and Noyce Initiative UC Partnerships grant for the University of California Women's Brain Initiative. Miolane was the recipient of the L'Oréal-Unesco for Women in Science Award, the Hellman Fellow award and is involved in outreach initiatives in France and in the U.S. At UCSB, Miolane's work was recognized by an Academic Senate Faculty Grant and a UC Regent's Junior Faculty Award.