Congratulations to Abigail Jacobs for being awarded a MIDAS grant
The Michigan Institute for Data Science (MIDAS) announced today the awardees of its first round of Propelling Original Data Science (PODS) Grants. 15 interdisciplinary teams, chosen from 65 proposals, receive funding support for an array of exciting projects with data science as the common thread. The projects range from detecting patterns of illicit wildlife trade networks, to reducing safety threats on social media, to understanding the energy sources in the Universe. Researchers on these projects are from 9 schools and colleges across the Ann Arbor and Dearborn campuses. For this set of projects, MIDAS provides a total of $860K of funding, and cost sharing from U-M departments and faculty amounts to an additional $220K.
-- from the MIDAS PODS grant page.
Professor Jacobs and collaborator Neil Carter submitted a grant proposal for the inaugural set of PODS grants, and just learned that they were selected to be one of the first cohort of recipients. Congratualtions to them both!
Neil Carter is an Assistant Professor in the School of Enivronment and Sustainability where he is also the PI of the Conservation & Coexistence Group . As it happens, Professor Carter will be giving our next Complex Systems Seminar coming up on Thursday, December 5, where he will be speaking on similar themes to the proposed grant work "Complex adaptive systems and human-wildlife coexistence".
Their winning grant proposal is entitled "Probabilistic Methods to Infer Structure and Dynamics of Illicit Wildlife Trade Networks". They plan to combine existing sources of data with probabilistic modeling to infer the pattern of wildlife exploitation supply chains and flows in the illicit wildlife trade of pangolins and freshwater turtles. The pair plan to explore social, political and environmental drivers of change in illicit wildlife trade networks.
