UCLA Fielding professor receives $2.1 million federal grant for work on biostatistics and artificial intelligence
Dr. Andrew Holbrook’s research will be supported by funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
Research by a UCLA Fielding School of Public Health scientist into using artificial intelligence and statistics to improve analytical tools used to track disease outbreaks will be funded by a newly-awarded $2.1 million federal grant.
“This is great news for our team; this funding will support our work bringing large collections of scientifically interpretable statistical models into the age of artificial intelligence,” said Dr. Andrew Holbrook, associate professor in the Department of Biostatistics, whose current research program will be funded for five years by the new grant. “Our team is building novel AI approaches to increase the speed and clarity with which hierarchical models are applied throughout the sciences.”
The funding, known as a Maximizing Investigators' Research Award (MIRA), is designed to provide support for individual investigators for research that lays the foundation for advances in disease diagnosis, treatment, and prevention; it was awarded by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), itself part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, officials said.
Currently, modern biomedicine generates data faster than it can be effectively analyzed, researchers said. Genome sequencing and electronic health records now produce datasets spanning millions of patients with up to hundreds of thousands of measurements each, researchers said.
“The statistical tools best suited to such data demand so much computation that the analysis itself has become a bottleneck of biomedical discovery,” Holbrook said. “This funding will help solve those issues.”
Holbrook's project, "Deep Bayesian Biostatistics," aims to break that bottleneck with artificial intelligence. His lab will train deep neural networks - including custom large language models built and trained at UCLA - to deliver the same rigorous statistical answers in a fraction of the time, and will release the tools as free, open-source software. Applications range from tracking the spread of diseases that include COVID-19 to evaluating drug and vaccine safety across the health records of millions.
“We are proud to see Dr. Holbrook receive this NIH award, which recognizes the promise of his work connecting statistics, AI, and biomedical research,” said Dr. Michele Guindani, chair and professor in the Department of Biostatics. “The funding will help his team develop tools that turn increasingly complex health data into reliable scientific evidence. This is where advances in biostatistics can have a lasting impact: giving researchers better ways to answer questions that matter for health.”
