Olga Vitek

Olga Vitek is a professor at the Khoury College of Computer Sciences. She has been named the Sy and Laurie Sternberg Interdisciplinary Associate Professor.

Research in Olga Vitek’s lab explores synergies between statistical science and machine learning—as applied to quantitative large-scale mass spectrometry-based investigations—to understand the functioning of living organisms. She develops methods for statistical experimental design, detects analyte signals in large and complex outputs from mass spectrometers, and works on the causal and counterfactual inference of regulatory events among the analytes. She also builds open-source software and educational materials, including MSstats (relative quantification of proteins in mass spectrometric experiments) and Cardinal (analysis of mass spectrometric images) currently used by many across academia and industry. 

Her lab was the lead organizer of the Institute on Computation and Statistics for Mass Spectrometry and Proteomics. She earned the Chan Zuckerberg Essential Open Source Software for Science Award, the Gilbert S. Omenn Computational Proteomics Award of the US Human Proteome Organization (USHUPO), Northeastern’s Excellence in Research and Creative Activity Award, and the National Science Foundation’s CAREER Award.

Vitek is currently a fellow of the American Statistical Association, a senior member of the International Society for Computational Biology, a member of the Council of Human Proteome Organization, and on the Board of Directors of USHUPO. She is associate editor of the journal, Bioinformatics, a member of the editorial advisory board of Molecular and Cellular Proteomics, and the president of the Boston Chapter of the American Statistical Association.

Before joining Northeastern, she was a tenured faculty member and a University Faculty Scholar at Purdue University. She earned her doctoral and master’s degrees in statistics from Purdue University and her Bachelor of Arts from the University of Geneva.