Penn State, Indian Institute of Science award joint research seed grant to biochemistry and molecular biology professor
Penn State and the Indian Institute of Science have announced the awardees for the 2024-25 cycle of their collaboration program. These awardees comprise four joint projects that connect Penn State and IISc researchers. The selected projects combine the unique expertise of each partnering institution to address global challenges or matters of bilateral importance to India and the United States.
The program, spearheaded by Penn State Global and the Office of International Relations at IISc, has offered interdisciplinary seed grant funding to foster collaborative, sustainable, and self-supporting research and education programs. Launched in April, the program received 27 joint project proposals in May.
“I am delighted that faculty at Penn State and IISc are very eager to engage in research collaboration and that this emerging strategic partnership is quickly gaining momentum,” said Sabine Klahr, interim vice provost for Penn State Global. “This demonstrates that dedicating resources strategically at both partner institutions to grow collaborations is effective, ultimately leading to a long-term, multi-disciplinary partnership that amplifies each university’s strengths and yields transformative outcomes.”
Utilizing complementary skillsets and cross-disciplinary efforts, the funding supports collaborative work covering diverse and broad topics, such as sensing and communications with reflective intelligent surfaces, democratization of genome assembly, large-scale distributed learning for democratizing future artificial intelligence, and pesticide transport by means of a vortex ring. The research projects, resulting from a series of workshops and the seed grant program, aim to establish long-term, multi-layered engagement between Penn State and IISc.
Paul Medvedev, professor of computer science and engineering, and of biochemistry and molecular biology, and Chirag Jain, assistant professor of computational and data science at IISc, were awarded a grant for their project: “Democratization of Genome Assembly.”
The project proposes to design novel algorithms and user-friendly software tools to help reduce computational costs through innovative data reduction algorithms, reduce financial costs by minimizing the amount of needed sequencing data and reduce manpower costs by automating the annotation of complete genomes, which typically requires vast resources. Applying a wide range of big data techniques to achieve these improvements, including machine learning, graph theory and combinatorial optimization, the project aims to open the door for researchers and clinicians and many downstream applications, including in biomedical, agricultural and basic biology, such as rare disease treatments, precision medicine, cancer treatment, agriculture and environmental conservation.
“The quality and quantity of seed applications spoke volumes of the synergistic ideas between Penn State and IISc,” said Anna Marshall, associate director for Asia partnerships at Penn State Global. “The ongoing, multidisciplinary research collaborations demonstrate the shared vision of both universities in building robust and sustainable engagement to tackle global challenges or matters of bilateral significance to India and the U.S.”
For more information on the IISc partnership, contact Marshall at awm15@psu.edu.
About the Indian Institute of Science
Established in 1909, the Indian Institute of Science is a leading public research university nestled in the technology heartland of Bangalore, India, which is known for its substantial contributions to science, engineering and management research. This strategic location in a city renowned as the “Silicon Valley of India” optimizes the university’s role in bridging ancient cultural heritage with modern technological advancements.