UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The Penn State Institute for Computational and Data Sciences (ICDS) has selected 56 projects to support as part of its Rising Researcher Collaborations Funding Opportunity. The program signals the institute’s strategic shift to focus on investing in early-career researchers and their work, according to Guido Cervone, director of ICDS.
“The success of this program shows the undeniable interest in enhancing scientific research across the University,” Cervone said. “ICDS remains focused on uplifting and advancing the scientific research community at Penn State by investing in our resources, and in our main areas of interest — computational and data sciences, quantum sciences, digital twins and artificial intelligence (AI). I am looking forward to supporting many multidisciplinary research projects, ICDS co-hires, Penn State faculty and staff, graduate students, postdoctoral and non-tenure line faculty who will make broader impacts in those domains through this endeavor.”
The program will support 47 faculty and staff principal investigators (PIs), and 56 rising researchers — graduate students, postdoctoral students and non-tenure line research faculty — across eight colleges and three campuses. Fourteen ICDS co-hires will be advising 23 rising researchers. Fifteen rising researchers will contribute to more than one project, some under multiple PIs.
The institute will provide funding for certain expenses, such as stipends for graduate students and a percentage of postdoctoral and non-tenure line research faculty salaries.
“When ICDS was created, there was an urgent need to build out computing infrastructure and core facilities,” said Wolf Hey, interim director of operations. “Now that ICDS has matured and is successfully delivering computing resources to the Penn State research community, we're able to think more strategically. Following extensive feedback from the ICDS community, we made the decision to rebalance our funding priorities to provide more focused support for research initiatives. After a year of streamlining operations and optimizing our spending, we're now able to allocate a significantly larger portion of our budget to directly support researchers and their work, while maintaining affordable and viable core facilities. The Rising Researcher program is funded entirely through our general ICDS budget and is an exciting example of things to come.”
The accepted projects will use techniques from computational and data sciences, quantum sciences, digital twins and AI to better understand the impacts of fire and extreme weather events; to elucidate protein misfolding, mutations and how the physical characteristics of disease emerge; to prevent health risks; to enhance road safety; and to analyze human and social dynamics.
“ICDS is particularly excited by the 15 of the rising researchers who successfully proposed to contribute to two distinct projects. We hope that they will help to spread existing expertise at Penn State across research groups,” said Eric Ford, distinguished professor in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics in the Eberly College of Science and ICDS co-hire, who is helping lead the program. “ICDS is proud to support these rising researchers and the Penn State faculty that are mentoring the next generation of multidisciplinary researchers. In addition to the direct research products, the experience they gain applying advanced computational and data science methods to novel research problems will prepare them for a wide variety of careers, whether in academia, translating science advances to the products in the private sector, or applying AI to benefit society.”
For a full list of supported projects, PIs and rising researchers, visit the ICDS website.
Editor’s note: This program was formerly named the ICDS Junior Researcher Collaborations Funding Opportunity.