UCLA Fielding biostatistics professor receives National Science Foundation award

Dr. Andrew Holbrook, assistant professor in UCLA Fielding's Department of Biostatistics, received the National Science Foundation's (NSF) CAREER Award for his work building statistical models for the global spread of viruses. The NSF CAREER Award is considered a prestigious award for early career faculty "who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization," according to the NSF. As part of the award, Dr. Holbrook will receive more than $500,000 in funding to support his research that develops viral "evolutionary contagion" models parameterized by flexible neural networks. A significant component of Dr. Holbrook's efforts will focus on scaling these models to big data settings with the help of graphics processing units (GPUs) and quantum computers.

Dr. Holbrook's research interests include scalable Bayesian inference for applications in neural decoding and viral epidemiology. He has previously been awarded the honorable mention for the 2019 Leonard J. Savage Award in Theory and Methods, awarded by the International Society for Bayesian Analysis, as well as an NIH (K) Career Development Award for developing high-performance computing methods to model the global spread of viruses in the context of big data. 

*Content provided by the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health's Department of Biostatistics