Lorin Crawford NSF Graduate Research Program Fellowship Recipient

Congratulations to Ph.D. student Lorin Crawford, who was recently selected to receive a 2015 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Program Fellowship! His award will provide him a stipend and the university will receive funding to cover his tuition and fees for a period of three years. As an NSF Fellow, he will be able to take advantage of many professional development opportunities. He plans on participating in NSF's GRIP (Graduate Research Internship Program) where fellows are partnered with federal agencies for mission-related and collaborative research under the guidance of host research mentors at federal facilities and national laboratories.

Lorin's submission, "Bayesian Stochastic Models for Grouped Hypotheses with Applications to Signaling Pathway Analysis," was selected based on his demonstrated potential to contribute to strengthening the vitality of the US science and engineering enterprise. His mentors for this project were Professor Sayan Mukherjee, Statistical Science, and Assistant Professor Kris Wood, Cancer Biology and Pharmacology. Their focus has been on improving the scalability and interpretability of existing Bayesian factor and generalized modeling techniques. With the motivation to better understand genetic relationships within a cell and to redefine biologically relevant signaling pathway interactions, Lorin is working on building stochastic models that will have the ability to identify specific genetic mutations that lead to certain changes in cellular function. His goal is to make it available to practitioners via an open source code in order to facilitate the learning and discovery of biological and genetic findings.