Alona Levy-Jurgenson

About me
I completed my PhD at the CS department at the Technion in Dec. 2023, advised by Prof. Zohar Yakhini. I was recently awarded the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Postdoctoral Award for Women in Mathematical and Computing Sciences.
In January 2025 I will be starting an exciting new role as Senior Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Oxford, generously funded by Google DeepMind. A large portion of my research will be dedicated to further developing and applying a new class of generative models that I recently invented -- Generative Topological Networks (GTNs) (details below).
In my PhD, I worked on developing a deep learning model to predict spatial gene expression levels from high resolution pathology whole-slide images -- a project supported by the European Union's Horizon 2020 and Google Cloud Research Credits. We also developed computational methods for characterizing tumor heterogeneity in spatial transcriptomics data. In another project we developed a multi-modal neural network with attention to predict molecular characteristics of the DNA from gene expression and DNA sequeunce.
My PhD coursework included the following courses from the Mathematics Department at the Technion: Introduction to Metric and Topological Spaces, Algebraic Topology, Real Analysis, Introduction to Group Theory, Ordinary Differential Equations, Introduction to Functional Analysis, Modules, Rings and Groups. The first two were the driving forces behind GTNs.
I received my MSc from Tel-Aviv University where I was advised by Prof. Erez Shmueli on developing machine learning models for digital signature verification using wrist-worn devices.
I was a lecturer in Algorithms for Computational Biology and a TA in the following courses: Algorithms 1; Intro. to Data Science; Intro. to Machine Learning.
I am currently a research assistant at the Yakhini Research Group at Reichman University and a lecturer and project advisor at the Technion.