Biology student awarded J. Howard Brown award from ASM Maryland
Loyola's Natural and Applied Sciences division is proud to recognize biology major Madeline Valentine who received first place for the J. Howard Brown Award for Outstanding Undergraduate abstracts by the American Society for Microbiology (ASM) Maryland Branch. Maddie's research work in collaboration with faculty mentor Christopher Thompson is making a contribution worthy of recognition in the field of microbiology. She presented her research at the ASM Maryland meeting on December 7. Please join us in congratulating Maddie on her accomplishment!
Computer Science Faculty Awarded Grant from NOAA
Dr. Sibren Isaacman, associate professor of computer science, was recently awarded a grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) via a partnership with small business partner, INNOVIM, LLC. The funding is a sub award from INNOVIM on a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant to develop a new Machine Learning technique for accurately forecasting extreme precipitation from Landfalling Atmospheric Rivers. The grant allows Dr. Isaacman to continue and extend his work as principal Computer Scientist with the INNOVIM team that took place during his sabbatical leave.
Predicting rainfall is a challenging problem. Dr. Isaacman’s team is exploring innovative ways to recombine established neural network architectures to outperform state of the art rain prediction as well as ways to more efficiently select the data used as input to the model. In phase one, the team demonstrated their LEARN2 model could outperform the GFS (national weather service weather model) when predicting whether it would rain more or less than average at specific points along the west coast. In phase two, they have expanded the area of prediction to the entire west coast, requiring data collection from the bulk of the Pacific, and are targeting the prediction to extreme rainfall, raising questions about processing and storing large amounts of data efficiently on limited hardware.
Increased confidence in forecasts provides benefits for advanced planning and decision-making with positive real-world impacts. Read INNOVIM’s press release about the grant and project here. We look forward to sharing more about Dr. Isaacman’s work in a future issue.
