Oyekunle Olukotun
OYEKUNLE “KUNLE” OLUKOTUN, a professor of electrical engineering and of computer science at Stanford’s School of Engineering, will share a $1.3 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to address challenges in human genetics and metagenomics – a field that studies DNA samples of diverse cultures found in the environment.
Olukotun received the grant with SRINIVAS ALURU, of Iowa State University, and WU-CHUN FENG, of Virginia Tech.
The grant is part of the NSF’s new Big Data fundamental research effort, which aims to develop new tools and methods to extract and use knowledge from large data sets to accelerate science and engineering innovation. With support from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), NSF recently announced nearly $15 million in awards.
“To get the most value from the massive biological data sets we are now able to collect, we need better ways of managing and analyzing the information they contain,” FRANCIS S. COLLINS, director of the National Institutes of Health, said in a recent press release. “The new awards that NIH is funding will help address these technological challenges – and ultimately help accelerate research to improve health – by developing methods for extracting important, biomedically relevant information from large amounts of complex data.”
