PROVIDENCE – A $1.5 million National Science Foundation grant to establish a mathematical and computational data research institute at Brown University was announced by the school Thursday.
The three-year award, which is one of 12 nationwide Transdisciplinary Research in Principles of Data Science grants totaling $17.7 million, comes less than a year after the Ivy League school launched its Data Science Initiative, which uses big data to solve some of the world’s most complex and universal issues including better understanding gene-environment interactions, outcomes of public policy decisions and recognizing injury or disease from CT scans and MRIs.
When Your Period Is Disrupting Your Life, It’s Time to Talk About It
For many women, heavy or irregular menstrual cycles are often brushed off as “normal”—something to…
Learn More
Those three foci, explained Jeffrey Brock, professor of mathematics and director of the DSI, will guide the new institute’s development of:
- new approaches for inferring cause-and-effect relationships in large datasets with thousands of potentially confounding variables;
- new methods for making graphical models of data more predictive and computationally tractable;
- and new techniques for using the geometric shape of a dataset to draw conclusions about the data it contains.
This grant funding will also create two-week immersion sessions for graduate students and faculty to study NSF TRIPODS focus areas at Brown’s mathematics institute, Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics, also funded by the NSF.
The $1.5 million TRIPODS grant is the first phase of funding available from the NSF in this program. Brown will be invited to apply for a second phase funding grant after three years.
Emily Gowdey-Backus is a staff writer for PBN. You can follow her on Twitter @FlashGowdey or contact her via email, gowdey-backus@pbn.com.
