In Memoriam: Hagit Shatkay-ReShef, 1965-2022

Hagit Shatkay-ReShef, a professor in the department of computer and information sciences and the department of biomedical engineering at the University of Delaware, died on January 2. She was 56 years old.

Dr. Shatkay-ReShef received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel. She earned a Ph.D. in computer science from Brown University in 1999.

Professor Shatkay-ReShef served as a postdoctoral fellow at the National Center for Biotechnology Information before spending two years as a private-sector informatics research scientist at Celera Genomics. She returned to academia as an assistant professor at Queen’s University in 2004, where she worked until joining the faculty at the University of Delaware as an associate professor in 2010. She joined the Center for Biomedical Engineering Research that same year and was promoted to full professor in 2018.

Dr. Shatkay-ReShef’s research interests focused on biomedical computing, computational biomedicine, and computational methods in the sciences, including biology, medicine and physics. She was an expert in machine learning and data science methods as applied to scientific and biomedical data. In one of her latest research endeavors, funded by a $1 million National Science Foundation grant, Dr. Shatkay-ReShef sought to develop computational methods that would accelerate data-intensive discovery in astroparticle physics, with a goal of better understanding dark matter.