Khoury News

From Argentine wet labs to Fenway Park: A biotech researcher’s journey into machine learning 

Daniela González already had a PhD, a Fulbright Scholarship, and years of lab work on her resume. But as she worked through the Align CS master's program, she found entirely new ways to think about the data that had defined her career.

August 3, 2026

by Madelaine Millar

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She builds them between biological sciences and data sciences, between academia and industry, between Argentina and Boston. In her speech to her fellow Khoury College graduates in Boston in April, she stressed that standing in the gaps between established ways of being is exactly what this moment asks of her fellow computer scientists.  

“The problems waiting for us will not be solved by one discipline. They will be solved by people who can connect what others keep apart. That is what Khoury trained us to be,” González said to the 679 assembled Khoury master’s grads. “Not specialists trapped in one language, but people fluent in more than one way of thinking.” 

Three days later, González delivered her message to a crowd of 3,400 master’s graduates at Northeastern’s university-wide commencement. 

“I came to Boston after years of scientific training in my own language, in my own field, with my own questions,” she told the Fenway Park crowd. “Of all the places I could have chosen to begin again, I chose Northeastern because of one promise it made me: that learning here would not stay inside the classroom.” 

González’s story begins in Tucumán, Argentina. She began working in wet labs in 2013 while still working on her bachelor’s in biotech, exploring the effects that active compounds in natural products were having on cancerous cell lines. She was particularly interested in using the scientific method to validate the effects of medicinal plants traditionally used by Argentina’s indigenous people. After graduating with honors, she researched at Fundación Miguel Lillo, the Instituto Nacional Del Cancer, Washington State University, and the INBIOFIV Institute, attracting media attention for her work.  

Enamored with — and increasingly expert at — the medicinal discovery process, González began a PhD in biological sciences at the Universidad National de Tucumán in 2018. There, she discovered machine learning, and quickly understood how the growing discipline could help scientific communities like hers to do more with the data and resources they had. So, when she finished her PhD, and with a Fulbright Scholarship under her belt, she moved to Boston to pursue a master’s degree in data science. 

But it isn’t always easy to build a new bridge.  

“The first semester was the hardest semester of my entire life,” González recalled, noting that while the Align program helped her navigate her new discipline, she also faced a major language barrier. “I knew how to speak English, but Boston has a particular accent. My first classes were really, really hard for me to understand.” 

González’s new friends and the steadfast support of her family got her through. By the next semester she had started to find her feet, and in the spring of 2025 she enrolled in Virgil Pavlu’s machine learning class. That’s where her bench scientist’s concept of data opened into a computer scientist’s concept. 

“As an experimental scientist, I was used to thinking about data that I could retrieve from the experiment I was running,” she said. “When I saw I could teach a model how to use that data to generate new data, that really blew my mind. Once you have this skill, your brain starts to think differently; you start to see potential data sources whatever you are.” She also credits College of Engineering professors like Jerome Braun and Ramin Mohammadi for building out other key capabilities.  

After that, there was no stopping González. She joined the Neural Dynamics Group, a lab in Northeastern’s Institute for Experiential AI that develops machine learning methods to address life sciences problems. There, she led the integration of wet and dry lab efforts to build multimodal AI models that predict drug interactions — all so physicians can prescribe complex treatments more safely.  

“The best thing that I got from my years working as an experimental scientist was that I could see how data was generated,” she said. “But we’re not facing a lack of data; we’re facing unstructured data. You have to find a way to make the most of the data that you have.” 

González loves the Neural Dynamics Group because it, too, functions as a bridge. The lab takes an academic approach to questions surfaced by industry partners. She enjoys that she can be more exploratory in her research than an industry position usually allows, while still working on questions that affect patients. 

“The good thing about Khoury is how we’re not keeping our science behind an academic wall; we’re trying to make an impact by going further with companies,” González said. “Before, I wrote three theses and too often, the thesis work just stayed in papers. Now, it’s about ‘Can you build a tool out of it? Can you do something for the community?’” 

In April, González was named to Northeastern’s Laurel and Scroll 100, which recognizes 100 exceptional graduate students who embody Northeastern’s core values of leadership, impactful research, and service to the community. She was also asked to deliver both the Khoury College commencement graduate student address and one of three student addresses at Northeastern’s graduate student commencement at Fenway Park.  

“I was really proud of being there — of the representation, what that means for other South American women,” she said. 

González is looking for other ways to give back to the scientific community in Argentina, too. In the past year, she gave three talks at Argentine universities — INTA, IMMCA (CONICET) and UNITEFA (CONICET) — focused on multimodal thinking, exploring the range of tools and public data sources available, and what becomes possible once you learn to code. 

Looking forward, González sees a future filled with bridges to build. Some are technical — for example, she’s itching to explore quantum drug discovery methods — while others are social, like ensuring that the benefits of scientific progress make it back to the communities from which the data comes. While the gaps may be large and complex, González is confident not just in the data science tools she acquired over the last three years, but also in her ability to use her tools to create connections.  

“Northeastern didn’t ask me to become someone else,” she said to the graduates at Fenway. “It asked me to become more of who I already was.”