The University of Delaware Library, Museums and Press, in collaboration with the Data Science Institute and Delaware EPSCoR, is proud to announce a new opportunity to celebrate and advance open knowledge: The Open Data Impact Awards.

This new program recognizes undergraduate and graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, faculty, staff and collaborative research teams whose open datasets make a meaningful impact on research, teaching or public engagement.

Three $1,000 awards will be given to individuals or teams whose datasets exemplify excellence in openness, documentation, reusability and potential for scholarly or public impact. Those who believe in the power of open data to drive discovery, deepen learning and spark innovation are strongly encouraged to apply by Friday, October 3rd, 2025.

DSI faculty council member Xiao Fang has coauthored a paper accepted to the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) 2025, a premier conference in artificial intelligence and natural language processing. The paper focuses on detecting large language model (LLM)-generated content and introduces a novel watermarking method called Sampling One Then Accepting (STA-1).

A laser therapy study, supported by UD’s Big Ideas Challenge, is being administered by DSI affiliated faculty member Roxana Burciu (left), assistant professor of kinesiology and applied physiology, and DSI affiliated faculty member John Jeka, professor of kinesiology and applied physiology (not pictured) whose research focuses on Parkinson’s disease (PD).  The goal is to improve symptoms by targeting brain regions affected by Parkinson’s, such as the frontal cortex, which supports executive function and memory and helps control motor behavior.

DSI affiliated faculty members Tarang Parekh and Daniel Harris recently published a cross-sectional analysis of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Health Interview Survey. The findings, published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, underscore the urgent need for disability-inclusive reforms as the nation looks beyond the pandemic.

DSI faculty council member Allison Karpyn, professor in the College of Education and Human Development’s Department of Human Development and Family Sciences and co-director of its Center for Research in Education and Social Policy, has been appointed to Delaware’s Food is Medicine Committee.

In a first-of-its-kind analysis recently published in the journal JAAC: Advances, DSI affiliated faculty member Tarang Parekh, assistant professor of epidemiology at the University of Delaware College of Health Sciences, and colleagues at Houston Methodist Hospital and Harvard Medical School, examined the state-level prevalence of CKM syndrome, using self-reported data from the Centers for Disease Control’s Behavioral Risk Factors Surveillance System from 2011 to 2023.