Assistant Professor Pradeep Ravikumar is part of a team of researchers, from the University of Texas at Austin, Boston University, and Harvard University, that have been selected as a recipient of one of 23 awards this year from the Department of Defense Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI). Their research project will develop mathematical and statistical methods to associate the conditions under which bacteria have grown with the resulting composition of the bacterial cell. This association has important applications both in bacterial forensics (e.g., identifying the source of a pathogen used in a deliberate attack) and in engineering applications.
The highly competitive MURI grants are large multi-million dollar awards that support multidisciplinary basic research; this year, 23 grants were selected from 251 papers and 78 proposals submitted to the Army Research Office (ARO), the Office of Naval Research (ONR), and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) in 21 topics.