Polina Golland is a professor in the EECS Department and an associate director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT. Her primary research interest is in developing novel techniques for biomedical image analysis and understanding. She particularly enjoys working on algorithms that either explore the geometry of the world and the imaging process in a new way or improve image-based inference through statistical modeling of the image data. Polina is interested in shape modeling and representation, predictive modeling, and visualization of statistical models. Her current research focuses on developing statistical analysis methods for characterization of biological processes based on image information. In this domain, she is interested in modeling biological shape and function and how they relate to each other and vary across individuals.