A special congratulations to Dr. Sheida Nabavi for her latest accomplishment of winning the NSF CAREER Award receiving $499,991 over five years for her research project: “CAREER: Machine learning and signal processing methods for analyzing single-cell sequencing data.” The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is a Foundation-wide activity that offers the National Science Foundation’s most prestigious awards in support of junior faculty 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.

The focus of this research is on identifying genomic variations in the form of copy number variations using DNA single-cell sequencing data, and clustering cells using RNA single-cell sequencing data. The developed methods and algorithms will significantly advance knowledge in extracting accurate information from complex and massive single-cell sequencing data by (i) providing optimal representation of genome coverage data by applying sparse optimization, (ii) modeling and reducing noise by employing denoising methods in signal processing, (iii) exploring information across cells by applying data-driven learning models and (iv) incorporating prior knowledge by adapting network and word embedding models.

The award reflects NSF’s statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation’s intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria. This is our faculty’s 14th NSF Career Award since the turn of the Century. Best wishes to Professor Nabavi for continued success!