Assistant Professor Farzana Nasrin has collaborated with the School of Life Sciences in a project to investigate genetic and metabolic components that may be related to repetitive behaviors that are common in people with autism. Their project received a five-year, $1.5M R01 National Institutes of Health/National Institute of General Medical Sciences grant.

This project will analyze complex sets of data (20,000 genes, 300 serum metabolites, and 1,000 gut microorganisms, as well as 3D-imaging of active neurons in fish brains). The team assumes that it is fair to use the fish project to predict the possible genetic and molecular pathways because humans and fish share more than 90% of gene and molecular pathways. These high dimensional data sets are challenging to visualize and analyze. However, by integrating topological mapping and statistical machine learning algorithms, the researchers are developing effective and flexible methods to analyze them with a limited amount of training samples.

More at UH News.

Grad student Jack McKee is featured in UH News for his work on coding a package that models the interaction of heated droplets and unheated droplets.

The “Pacific Island Structured-Adaptive Mesh Refinement with Arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian” (PISALE) software was supported by a three-year, $591,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Energy. Alice Koniges is the Principal Investigator.

We are proud to announce that Assistant Professor Yash Lodha has been awarded a prestigious CAREER grant from the National Science Foundation to work on Algebraic, Analytic, and Dynamical Properties of Group Actions on 1-Manifolds and Related Spaces.

From the Award abstract:

A group is a mathematical abstraction of symmetries of a physical object or a theoretical space. Groups are fundamental objects in mathematics that also emerge in various applications such as in computer science and physics. The algebraic notion of a group associates to a set a binary operation, like multiplication, which satisfies a list of axioms. Groups emerge naturally as symmetries of various types of concrete or abstract spaces in mathematics. There is an intricate relationship between the geometric properties of these spaces and the algebraic properties of their groups of symmetries. The PI will continue his investigation of the landscape of infinite groups that emerge as symmetries of the most natural spaces in mathematics, the circle and the real line. The PI will organize two research workshops aimed at graduate students, and two research experiences programs for undergraduates. These shall be aimed at training a diverse body of students to become future leaders in mathematics. These activities will incorporate computational methods into the students’ mathematical exploration of the landscape of infinite groups.

More at UH News.

Another active CAREER award in our department is that of Associate Professor Elizabeth Gross.