Dalton receives five-year $449,000 NSF CAREER Award

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Lori Dalton, as

Assistant Professor Lori Dalton
sistant professor of electrical and computer engineering and biomedical informatics, received a five-year, $449,341 NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award for her research in optimal Bayesian methods for classification.

The CAREER award is the National Science Foundation’s most prestigious award in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of both.

Dalton plans to develop optimal Bayesian computational and statistical methods for small-sample classification to address the problem of predictive and replicable scientific discovery in biomedicine and beyond. A major application for her work is in diagnosis and prognosis prediction for cancer patients when there are relatively few examples. 

“One aim of this project is to build optimal classifiers where data from high-throughput gene expression measurement technologies are enriched with scientific information in the form of gene interactions and biological pathways that are available in the literature,” explained Dalton.

In addition to applications in genomics, which have the potential to impact health and wellness in society, the project has many research applications in materials discovery and other areas in science, engineering and statistics.

Part of the grant funding will support training and educating students at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, particularly through the development of a book and course on pattern recognition that incorporate research results and practical project applications.

Dalton earned a PhD in electrical engineering from Texas A&M University in 2012, the same year she joined the Ohio State faculty. Her current research interests include pattern recognition, estimation, optimization, genomic signal processing, systems biology, bioinformatics, robust filtering and information theory.

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