Micaela Elisa Consens

PhD Candidate · Computer Science · University of Toronto

I'm a Computer Science PhD candidate at the University of Toronto (Moses and Wang labs) working at the intersection of machine learning and genomics. My research asks: can we use self-supervised learning as a method for biological discovery?

I develop methods to interpret what deep learning models for genomics learn during self-supervised pre-training, and design biologically-motivated pre-training objectives grounded in known biological structure: constraints and organizational patterns derived from established biological relationships, including evolutionary conservation, regulatory grammar, and more.