Esra Akbas, an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and a faculty member of the Transcultural Conflict and Violence (TCV) Initiative, was recently awarded by the National Science Foundation with a grant under the NSF’s Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER).

CAREER grants support early-career faculty to 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.

As primary investigator (PI), Dr. Akbas will use the funding to continue her research on graph machine learning and its application to drug repurposing and event detection problems with collaborating experts from different domains.

One specific application she will work on is analyzing dynamic extremist group networks via the graph neural network (GNN) deep learning model to understand their structure and detect their events. The project is expected to last from 2024 through 2029.

Dr. Akbas leads the Computer Science department’s Data Engineering Lab, where she and a team of doctoral, master’s and undergraduate students work on problems ranging from the algorithmic side of machine learning to applications in real-world problems. Their focus is graph mining, graph machine learning, network science, and social network analysis and their applications in social, biological, and medical domains.

In addition to support from the NSF CAREER grant, she has also received support previously from the NSF’s Division of Information & Intelligent Systems, and through NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates site funding. Through the REU support, she has organized an eight-week summer research program to provide undergraduates a research-intensive training and offer valuable opportunities to actively engage in multidisciplinary data analytics projects.

Read more about Dr. Akbas’ NSF CAREER grant through the link at the blue button below.

Information used in this news posting was obtained from the TCV Initiative, posted by J. Dante McBride and originally published here on the TCV website. This synopsis was drafted by Jeremy Craig, Communications Manager for the Office of the Provost.