University of Illinois

Simina Boca grew up in Bucharest, Romania, and participated in many math contests as a kid. Her best result was fourth place nationally in the ninth grade, but she was pretty sure she didn’t want to focus on pure math as a career. When she attended a genetics class her senior year in high school in the United States, she discovered biostatistics and majored in math at the University of Illinois. Along the way, she realized she enjoyed working with data and thinking about data. 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.