Data Science Institute (DSI) members James Anderson, Elham Azizi, Asaf Cidon, and David Knowles have each received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award.
The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program offers the National Science Foundation’s most prestigious awards in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.
Anderson is an assistant professor of electrical engineering at Columbia Engineering and an affiliated member of DSI’s Foundations of Data Science and Sense, Collect and Move Data centers. His research interests include optimal and robust control theory, mathematical programming, data privacy and sensitivity, and theoretical aspects of cyber-physical systems; applications of interest include optimal power flow problems, smart grids, and systems biology. He completed his D.Phil. (Ph.D.) in engineering science at Oxford University.
Azizi is an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Columbia Engineering, Herbert and Florence Irving Assistant Professor of Cancer Data Research at the Irving Institute for Cancer Dynamics, and an affiliated member of DSI’s Foundations of Data Science and Health Analytics centers. Her research utilizes an interdisciplinary approach combining cutting-edge, single-cell genomic technologies with statistical machine learning techniques to characterize complex populations of interacting cells in the tumor microenvironment as well as their dysregulated circuitry. She completed her Ph.D. in bioinformatics at Boston University.
Cidon is an assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Columbia Engineering and an affiliated member of DSI’s Computing Systems for Data-Driven Science, Cybersecurity, and Sense, Collect and Move Data centers. He focuses on software systems, storage, systems for large-scale machine learning, and cybersecurity. His work on distributed storage systems was adopted in commercial storage systems of several companies, including Facebook, Tibco, Hortonworks, and Rubrik. Cidon completed his Ph.D. in electrical engineering at Stanford University.
Knowles is an assistant professor of computer science at Columbia Engineering and an affiliated member of DSI’s Computing Systems for Data-Driven Science, Foundations of Data Science and Health Analytics centers. His research focuses on the development of novel machine learning methods and their application to data analysis challenges in genomics with the aim to better understand the role of transcriptomic dysregulation across the spectrum from rare to common genetic disease. He also focuses on better characterization of the genetic and environmental factors contributing to mRNA expression and splicing variation. Knowles completed his Ph.D. in engineering with a machine learning concentration at Cambridge University.