Goeva Lab

Dr. Aleksandrina Goeva

Aleksandrina Goeva is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto’s Donnelly Centre, with affiliations in the Departments of Molecular Genetics and Computer Science, a Faculty Affiliate at the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and a Visiting Scientist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. She received her BSc in Applied Mathematics from Sofia University, and her MSc and PhD from Boston University in Mathematics and Statistics respectively. She then completed her postdoctoral training at the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

In addition to her research, Aleksandrina is actively involved in building scientific communities across disciplines. She has served as a co-chair and steering committee member of the MIA initiative at the Broad Institute, organized international workshops on representation learning in biology at NeurIPS and ICLR, and is a founding member of the Early Career Board at the Harvard Data Science Review. She is also deeply committed to teaching and mentorship, with over a decade of experience teaching across multiple institutions. Her research program has been supported by competitive funding, as well as international and institutional fellowships.

Elia Afanasiev (since 06/2025)

Elia is a Computational Research Technician working in the Goeva lab. He got his Master of Science degree at the Stratton lab at McGill University in Montreal, working on investigating the effects of ependymal IFNGR activation. In his work, Elia is driven by a deep passion for Open Science and accessibility in software engineering more broadly. When he has the free time, Elia likes to read.

Arhan Rupani (since 05/2025)

Arhan is in his senior year of undergrad pursuing a specialist in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at the University of Toronto. He joined the lab in the summer of 2025. His project is based around using statistical and computational methods to investigate the biology of cancer stem cells (cells of origin of cancer). He describes his academic interests as the power set of the set: {Bioinformatics, probability, statistics, cancer biology, evolutionary biology}. In his free time he enjoys programming, reading history books, and lifting weights. He aspires to become a scientist (university professor) one day.