UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Fenglong Ma, assistant professor in the Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology, is the recipient of a 2022 Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award from the National Science Foundation in recognition of his work, “Automated Multimodal Learning for Healthcare.”
The CAREER award is the NSF's most prestigious award in support of 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. The award will provide five years of funding to support Ma’s research aimed at developing and testing new algorithms and techniques for analyzing and integrating different types of health care data, such as electronic health records, medical imaging, and patient-generated data. It will also provide Ma important resources and opportunities to train and mentor students.
“I am thrilled and honored to have been selected for this award. It is a recognition of the hard work that my team and I have put into our research, and it will allow us to take our work to the next level,” said Ma. “I am deeply grateful to the NSF for their support and belief in our project.”
By combining different types of health care data and using advanced machine learning techniques, Ma hopes to better understand the complex interactions between different health factors and develop more personalized and effective treatments, ultimately leading to more accurate diagnoses, better treatment plans and improved outcomes for patients.
Added Ma, “This project represents a significant advancement in the state-of-the-art of health care analytics and automated machine learning. It has the potential to revolutionize the way health care is delivered, improve quality of care and patient outcomes, and reduce costs.”
Ma’s research focuses on the design, analysis and application of learning algorithms for various big data, including health data, text data, image data and multimodal data. He explores both principled methodologies and innovative applications with highly practical performance that can be used to understand the overwhelmingly large and complex data collected from daily life. He is the lead or co-investigator on nearly $2.5 million in externally funded projects, including a grant from the National Institutes of Health to study early Alzheimer’s detection.
Ma joined the College of IST in 2019 as a faculty co-hire in the Institute for Computational and Data Sciences. He is an affiliate of the Center for Socially Responsible Artificial Intelligence and directs the Penn State Data Science Lab. He earned a doctoral degree in computer science and engineering from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 2019 and holds master’s and bachelor’s degrees from Dalian University of Technology in China.