Olukotun wins NSF Big Data grant

The National Science Foundation (NSF), with support from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has announced that Oyekunle "Kunle" Olukotun, a professor of electrical engineering and of computer science at the Stanford University School of Engineering, and two colleagues were among the recipients of a grant as part of the NSF’s new Big Data fundamental research effort. The awards aim to develop new tools and methods to extract and use knowledge from large data sets to accelerate science and engineering innovation.

Olukotun and Srinivas Aluru, of Iowa State University, and Wuchun Feng, of Virginia Tech, won a grant of $1.3 million to develop core techniques and software libraries for high-throughput DNA sequencing to address challenges in human genetics and metagenomics—a field that studies DNA samples of diverse cultures found in the environment.

"By funding the fundamental research to enable new types of collaborations--multi-disciplinary teams and communities--and with the start of an exciting competition, today we are realizing plans to advance the foundational science and engineering of Big Data, fortifying U.S. competitiveness for decades to come," said NSF Director Subra Suresh in a press release announcing the grants.