News
The Power of Undergraduate Research
DSI Training Working Group member Esther Biswas-Fiss, (left) professor and chair of medical and molecular sciences, senior honors medical diagnostics major Sean Fletcher, and Sam Biswas, professor of medical and molecular sciences, worked together to uncover specific mutations that may alter protein function and significantly increase cancer risk, paving the way for improved approaches to diagnosing and treating HPV-related cancers.
For the Record
DSI Resident Faculty member Sanford Student, assistant professor in CEHD’s School of Education, was named to the Maryland State Department of Education Technical Advisory Committee and California’s Desired Results Developmental Profile Technical Advisory Committee and has also recently published several articles with DSI Resident Faculty member Ethan McCormick, SOE Assistant Professor.
NASA’s Next Generation of Scientists
DSI Fellow, Doctoral student Siddharth Chaini received one of only 24 NASA FINESST astrophysics grants, selected from more than 450 applications. He will create a method for combining data from surveys of the night sky collected with different scientific goals in mind. The work will make it easier for scientists to analyze the data and identify astral events, or previously unknown objects.
AI Bots Swarm UDSpace for Information
UDSpace, the University of Delaware’s digital repository managed by UD’s Library, Museum and Press, has massive amounts of high-quality data that is attractive to AI companies. “This is all a testament to the ingenuity and the great lengths that our team has gone to to maintain access to information,” DSI Infrastructure Working Group member Annie Johnson said. “AI is changing the rules, and this is an excellent example of UD Library’s IT team quickly responding with an incredible solution that doesn’t limit our students, faculty, staff, and the global community from accessing the information that UDSpace holds.”
An Emerging Leader in Computing
DSI Faculty Council member Sunita Chandrasekaran, director of the new First State AI Institute at UD, is the recipient of the Emerging Woman Leader in Technical Computing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery.
For the Record
Professor Anjana Bhat, DSI affiliated faculty member, was named a Catherine Worthingham Fellow of the American Physical Therapy Association. The fellowship is the highest honor in the PT profession and serves as inspiration for all physical therapists to attain professional excellence.
Examining Food Systems
DSI resident faculty member Kyle Davis (left), an associate professor with joint appointments in UD’s Department of Geography and Spatial Sciences and the Department of Plant and Soil Sciences, and a UD alumnus, has been awarded with a National Science Foundation Early Career Development Award to continue his research looking at food systems.
For the Record
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).
Lighting up Hope
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.
For the Record
DSI affiliated faculty member Jennifer Kubota, associate professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, has been nominated president-elect of the Social and Affective Neuroscience Society (SANS), a leading organization in the neuroscience community.
Our Mission
The Institute aims to accelerate research in data science, serving as a nucleating effort to catalyze interdisciplinary research collaborations across fields impacting our society.