Simina Boca

Affiliation
Associate Professor, Georgetown University

Education
PhD, Biostatistics, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
MHS, Bioinformatics, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
BS, Mathematics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Originally from Bucharest, Romania, Simina Boca moved around a lot as a kid, spending time in Romania, the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. She always liked and did well in math. For example, she went to many math contests when she was young, with her best result being fourth place nationally in Romania in the ninth grade. Still, she was fairly sure she didn’t want to focus on pure math.

Boca’s parents both have math PhDs and encouraged her to pursue a career that would bring her professional satisfaction. It took her a few years to decide on biostatistics. Most applied math fields—physics, economics, engineering—didn’t appeal to her.

During Boca’s senior year of high school in the United States, she took a genetics class she enjoyed and learned about the biostatistics field. In college, she was a math major at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign while taking many molecular biology classes. She also took a probability class she enjoyed. Boca used to think she was not good at “counting problems” and probability consisted of counting problems, but that class helped her understand that 1) there is much in probability beyond counting problems and 2) she could actually excel at counting problems if she approached them in an organized—actually algorithmic—way.

Boca also realized she is good at programming, despite always feeling confused in her high-school programming classes. Two summer internships at Argonne National Lab in college allowed her to get hands-on experience in Perl, which she found easy to convert to R when she needed to. As a result, pursuing biostatistics in graduate school seemed like a natural fit.

Boca earned her PhD from Johns Hopkins in 2011 and had a postdoctoral fellowship at the National Cancer Institute before joining Georgetown University in 2014 as a faculty member in the Innovation Center for Biomedical Informatics. She realized along the way that she enjoys working with data and thinking about data. These days, whether she defines herself as a biostatistician, data scientist, or biomedical informatician is partly defined by her role on a project.

From a professional perspective, her proudest moment was convincing collaborators to rerun an experiment because the initial one had pronounced batch effects that could not be fixed at the analysis stage. From a personal perspective, she is proud of her family. She and her husband married when she was in graduate school and they have two beautiful children. Her number one goal is to serve as an inspiration to them.