In Hawaii, progress in data science has the potential to address critical needs in power, transportation, healthcare and communications. But to benefit the population at large, technological progress must take economic, business and social factors into consideration. The ECE department (with PI Narayana Santhanam, co-PI June Zhang and Senior Personnel Gurdal Arslan, Yuanzhang Xiao and Yao Zheng) now leads a collaborative program to develop solutions for decarbonization (power, transport), healthcare and communications with a 3 million dollar National Science Foundation Research Traineeship (NRT) award to the University of Hawaii at Manoa. This program will also train the next generation of graduate students (Masters and PhD) to be multidisciplinary and able to tackle challenges of the future from different angles. We look forward to working with our partners in ICS (co-PI Philip Johnson), Economics (co-PI Nori Tarui), JABSOM (Andras Bratincsak) and Shidler Business School (Shirley Daniels and Daniel Port).

The award provides fellowships (34,000/year) and pays tuition for graduate students while they are funded by the program. Trainees will participate in an innovative graduate program that will provide them a cross-disciplinary, well-rounded look at the problems of the future. They will work in cohorts with students from all the above departments, and potentially, future partners as well. For more details, please contact Narayana Santhanam (nsanthan@hawaii.edu). Undergraduate and those contemplating BAM are particularly encouraged to contact us to plan out your opportunities. See the National Science Foundation press release and the UH news article.