Shuiwang Ji Wins Prestigious NSF CAREER Award
September 22, 2014
Shuiwang Ji
Computational brain analytics is a field that promises in the near future to provide new understanding of how the brain functions, and a young computer scientist at Old Dominion University is poised to help lead this initiative.
Shuiwang Ji, ODU assistant professor of computer science, has received a prestigious Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) worth $872,000 to promote his research.
The CAREER grant offers the NSF's most prestigious awards in support of junior faculty members who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations, according to NSF. Ji's funding began in August and extends through July 2019.
The title of the grant is "Towards the Next Generation of Data-Driven Computational Brain Analytics."
Two years ago, the NSF invested almost $600,000 in a research project led by Ji that has worked toward a new and comprehensive way to map the intricate workings of the mammalian brain. Ji and colleagues have used image-processing tools together with advanced computational methods to try to unravel the brain circuitry that generates high-level cognitive functions.
This latest CAREER Grant is evidence that the NSF believes Ji's work has already resulted in scientific payoffs, and that more are to come.
"This is a futuristic project with great possible impact," one member of the NSF grant review panel said of Ji's proposal. "It is novel, technically superb, and in the hands of a mature PI (principal investigator) with strong record."
Morris Foster, ODU's vice president for research agreed and placed the project in broader perspective for the university: "This is yet another ODU award under President Obama's BRAIN Initiative. While ODU may lack a medical school, we certainly have all synapses firing in cutting-edge neuroscience research. Dr. Ji's CAREER award adds to an emerging critical mass in funded BRAIN projects at ODU."
The dean of the ODU College of Sciences, Chris Platsoucas, said Ji, who joined ODU in 2010, "has been a most productive researcher and an engaging teacher who has helped our university strengthen its impact in computational biology, computational neuroscience and bioinformatics. We salute his achievement in receiving this NSF CAREER Grant."
Ji called the human brain "the most complex piece of organized matter in the known universe," and added, "It contains a vast number of cells that are organized into structures and connected into networks which control and optimize information processing, ultimately generating the cognition, perception and behavior of an organism. No other natural or engineered system can match its adaptability, reliability, robustness and energy efficiency."
At the root of the brain's complex interactions between billions of neurons and trillions of synapses are the genes that call the shots in the actual development and function of an organism's brain. It is at the gene - or genome level - that Ji's research begins.
"Genome-wide, brain-wide, multi-level investigation into the genome-connectome brain architecture is a major scientific challenge," he explained. "Most prior work has focused on low-resolution, single-level analyses yielding incomplete understanding of the link from genes to circuits to systems."
With the NSF CAREER Grant funding, he first wants to perform predictive analytics in which the brain-wide connectome is predicted from the genetic transcription process. "This analysis will elucidate the information pathway from genes to connectivity and, ultimately, to function," Ji said.
Secondly, he wants to put to use a new class of probability distributions defined on multidimensional data arrays that will integrate other brain dimensions. This will allow him to perform multidimensional network correlative analytics.
His third initiative will address the relationship between gene expression, cell types and brain structures.
Ji's work over the next five years will coincide with the march toward more powerful computers that are more able to keep track of the seemingly infinite number of multidimensional brain interactions that happen in a split-second of brain activity.
His project summary states that he will introduce and develop these three novel and significant advances to "dramatically extend current analytics techniques towards understanding multilevel, complex brain systems." With the successful completion of this project will come what he called "a new class of efficient, robust analytics methods that are flexible enough to be adapted for integrating, modeling and mining current and future brain data.
Ji will engage a variety of students from ODU, as well as from Ocean Lakes High School in Virginia Beach, in this project, and the grant calls for him to help recruit underrepresented students - identified by race, gender and physical disability - into computing-related majors.
The grant that Ji received from the NSF in 2012 is titled "Integrative Analysis of the Anatomic and Genetic Landscapes in the Mouse Brain." It came from NSF's Directorate for Biological Sciences, Division of Biological Infrastructure and the work has centered on the Allen Brain Atlas developed by the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle. The atlas includes three-dimensional mapping of gene activity throughout the adult mouse brain, and it has become a resource for thousands of brain researchers around the world.
(The mouse brain has similar basic parts and organization of other mammalian brains, and is a common model for studies that are designed to shed light on workings of the human brain.)
Ji said the CAREER Grant will allow him to continue work in conjunction with the Allen Brain Atlas and to also contribute to President Obama's recent Brain Research through Advancing innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) initiative.