We are excited to announce the great news that Dr. Chao Chen has won the prestigious NSF CAREER award!

Dr. Chao Chen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics. He is also affiliated with the Department of Computer Science and the Department of Applied Mathematics & Statistics. Chao is an expert in applications of the theory of topological data analysis in machine learning and in biomedical image analysis. He has been carrying out innovative, groundbreaking research in the development of topology-driven Artificial Intelligence (AI) paradigms capable of targeting many areas of science and engineering with a particular focus on problems arising in biomedical informatics.

His NSF CAREER project, titled "Topology-Driven Learning for Biomedical Imaging Informatics", will systematically incorporate topological reasoning into AI methods by leveraging the theory of persistent homology, which provides robust and differentiable representations of topology. His approach will enable topological patterns to be learned and exploited in a data-driven and task-driven manner. Chao’s work will facilitate the use of topological information to carry out a variety of AI tasks, including to classify biomedical structures, to generate realistic synthetic data for training robust AI algorithms and to develop methods for the representation and analysis of time dependent data. This work is already having tremendous impact on the field of biomedical informatics and is also shedding insight into the theoretical foundation of AI. Through the course of the project, Chao will closely collaborate with domain experts to apply his methods to the extraction and analysis of complex biomedical structures arising from histopathology images and radiology images.

Chao’s project will also provide a focused data science education to students. The education program will engage students, ranging from high school to graduate levels, through training on topology-centric data exploration with real-world data from biomedicine, science and engineering. With this hands-on approach, the students will learn not only the foundations of data science but also its practical applications.

More details can be found at Dr. Chen's Website and the NSF Award Page.

Please join us in congratulating Chao on his achievement!!!”