Funding
Recent Funding
Faculty and student research is often funded through grant awards, with grants potentially coming from federal, corporate, and philanthropic organizations. Information is provided below on recent grant awards to department faculty.
Awards are associated with the year of initial funding, and within a year, awards are alphabetized by faculty member last name.
2025
Sarra Alqahtani, National Science Foundation. CAREER: Safety-Centered Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning: Algorithms, Testing Tools, and Benchmarks, 2025-2030.
Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) lets multiple autonomous systems, such as UAVs, learn to perform and collaborate on complex tasks. As these systems interact in unpredictable environments, unexpected behaviors can arise, raising safety and reliability concerns. This project aims to make MARL systems safer by developing new algorithms, testing tools, certification methods, and benchmarks to ensure they perform reliably even in challenging or compromised conditions. It also includes educational efforts to train the next generation of AI researchers to develop safer, more trustworthy AI systems – Award Information
Fan Yang, National Institutes of Health (NIH) R21: Towards Interpretable Imaging-based Gastric Cancer Prognosis via Prototypical and Attentional Deep Learning”, 2025-2027.
It is currently estimated that up to around 30% of patients diagnosed with gastric cancer are over- or under- treated, sustaining substantial morbidities from unnecessary side-effects or treatment failures. Our proposal focuses on developing innovative deep learning methods with intrinsic interpretability to analyze radiology and pathology images, enhancing the model’s generalizability and clinical applicability, while providing valuable information to complement the current clinical staging system. Ultimately, effectively integrating radiology and pathology imaging with the current clinicopathological markers could enable more informed, precision- medicine, treatment decisions to reduce unnecessary side-effects while improving long-term outcomes for patients diagnosed with gastric cancer – Award Information
Fan Yang, National Science Foundation. CRII: Towards Efficient Interpretation for Explainable Learning: A Computational Perspective on Attribution and Recourse, 2025-2027.
Artificial intelligence is helping doctors diagnose and treat diseases, but many AI systems are “black-boxes” with respect to decision making, raising concerns about trust and safety. This research will develop more efferent and reliable ways for AI to explain its reasoning, with particular application to the healthcare domain – Award Information
2024
Grey Ballard and Aditya Devarakonda, Department of Energy. Tensor-based Streaming Algorithms for Scientific Data Compression, 2024-2027. Dr. Ballard and Dr. Devarakonda will work with collaborators at Argonne National Laboratory, NC State University, and Tufts University to develop a suite of randomized and tensor-based techniques to address compression of data and models in scientific applications. The datasets they will tackle involve observations, experiments, and simulations that are generated by Department of Energy user facilities (e.g., the Advanced Photon Source). The project seeks to unlock the multidimensional structure of this data by computing compressed approximations via tensor decompositions.
2023
Minghan Chen, National Science Foundation. CAREER: Towards a Living Neuron Twin for Improving Human Cognitive Health, 2023-2028 — Award Information
Minghan Chen, National Science Foundation. NSF Student Travel Grant for the 2023 International Workshop on Computational Network Biology: Modeling, Analysis, and Control (CNB-MAC), 2023-2024 — Award Information
Aditya Devarakonda, National Science Foundation. NSF Student Travel Grant for 2023 International Conference on Parallel Processing (ICPP), 2023-2024. — Award Information
Natalia Khuri, Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist Comprehensive Cancer Center. Using Machine Learning and High Dimensional Flow and Mass Cytometry To Predict AML Relapse Following Transplant, 2023-2024.
Xueyuan (Michael) Vanbastelaer, National Science Foundation. CRII: SaTC: Robust Explainable Provenance-based Intrusion Detection, 2023-2025 — Award Information
2022
Grey Ballard and Aditya Devarakonda, Department of Energy, Sparsitute: A Mathematical Institute for Sparse and Structured Problems in Science and Engineering, 2022-2027 — Institute Website
2021
Sarra Alqahtani, National Science Foundation, CRII: RI: Secure Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Algorithms, 2021-2023 — Award Information
Grey Ballard, National Science Foundation, Collaborative Research: OAC Core: Robust, Scalable, and Practical Low-Rank Approximation, 2021-2024 — Award Information
Minghan Chen, National Institutes of Health (sub-award via University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill), Uncovering the Heterogeneity of Neurodegeneration Trajectories in Alzheimer’s Disease Using a Network Guided Reaction-Diffusion Model, 2021-2023 — Award Information
2020
Grey Ballard, National Science Foundation, CAREER: Communication-Avoiding Tensor Decomposition Algorithms, 2020-2025 — Award Information
Paúl Pauca and Sarra Alqahtani, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (sub-award via Dartmouth University), Rapid Change and Development in a Tropical Biodiversity Hotspot: A Multi-Sensor Fusion Approach to Quantify Terrestrial and Aquatic Impacts and Test Policy Effectiveness, 2021-2023