Sullivan awarded data science fellowship

Dr. Blair D. Sullivan, assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at North Carolina State University, was recently awarded a Data Science Faculty Fellowship from the National Consortium for Data Science (NCDS).

The NCDS is a collaboration of leaders in academia, industry and government founded to take advantage of the increasing digital data to produce new jobs and industries, to make advances in healthcare, and to initiate scientific discoveries. Its mission is to advance data science research, educate the next generation of data scientists and translate data innovations into economic opportunity.

The inaugural fellowships, created to support this goal, were awarded to five faculty members at NCDS academic partner institutions.

Sullivan will receive $30,000 to support her work on the identification and tracking of overlapping groups of similar entities (e.g., people, samples, genes) over time.

Her goal is to develop new algorithms that will improve data analysis and workflow in fields as diverse as network analysis, healthcare policy, materials science, climate simulation, fluid dynamics, bioinformatics and cyber security.

Sullivan earned a PhD in mathematics from Princeton University in 2008, an MA in mathematics from Princeton University in 2005 and BS degrees in applied mathematics and computer science from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2003. She joined the NC State faculty in fall 2013 and holds a joint faculty appointment with Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where she was previously a computational mathematician.