Dr. Xiaoning Qian, assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University, has received the prestigious Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF).
Qian, who is also affiliated with the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station’s (TEES) AgriLife Center for Bioinformatics and Genomic Systems Engineering (CBGSE), received his CAREER award for his proposal, "Knowledge-driven Analytics, Model Uncertainty and Experiment Design.”
Qian proposes a knowledge-driven analytics framework to solve mathematical and computational issues that exist in high-dimensional network-based systems prediction and intervention problems where the models are uncertain. He says this framework has strong potential for translating available diverse large-scale data to create reproducible knowledge for driving life sciences and materials science research. If successful, it could eventually lead to computational tools for more efficient experimental design to maximize the use of existing big data and speed up the processes for effective disease therapeutics and new materials discovery. Qian believes that the interdisciplinary nature of his proposal promises to foster cross-fertilization of ideas between engineering, life sciences and materials science, in both the domains of research and education.
Qian received his bachelor's and master's degrees from Shanghai Jiao-Tong University, China, and his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Yale University in 2005. Prior to joining Texas A&M, he worked for four years as an assistant professor at the University of South Florida.
His current research interests include computational network biology, genomic signal processing and biomedical image analysis. Some of his interdisciplinary research efforts at Texas A&M have been recently funded by an NSF EAGER grant, a USDA grant and a grant from the Los Alamos National Laboratory. He recently co-organized the International Workshop on Computational Network Biology: Modeling, Analysis and Control (CNB-MAC). He has been serving on the editorial boards for several journals and on the organizing and technical program committees for several international conferences.