UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Xiang Zhang, associate professor in Penn State’s College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST), has been awarded a $499,210 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to pursue research of mining large and complex networks. By developing new tools to decipher big data, Zhang plans to draw more actionable conclusions from extremely large data collections, like the information captured from billions of Facebook users.
“I’m very excited about this project because it can be applied in various domains,” Zhang explained. “It can help recommend new friends in social networks, identify potential collaborations for cross-disciplinary research, dissect genetic bases of complex diseases, and identify new drug targets that enable drug repositioning.”
Zhang is especially interested in applying these findings to medicine to help doctors understand how diseases progress. He said, “The findings could then help them search for new and effective treatments.”