Congratulations to Erman Ayday, xLab professor and assistant professor in the Department of Computer and Data Science, for being awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) grant. The CAREER award is considered the agency’s most significant grant for junior faculty members whom NSF believes “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 new five-year, $500,000 grant will support Ayday’s ongoing work to identify, analyze and mitigate privacy vulnerabilities for individuals who share their genomic information with institutions, which then share the data with wider genomic databases.
Ayday has helped lead several past xLab projects and is currently leading a fall semester project with Hyland Software developing a solution for storing and sharing verifiable, blockchain-anchored digital credentials. His appointment as an xLab faculty member was finalized during the summer.