A better definition of obesity
January 14, 2025
Three Northwestern University assistant professors — Julia Gaudio, Rachel Greenfeld and István Kovács — have received the prestigious Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the foundation’s most prestigious honor for junior faculty members.
Gaudio, an assistant professor of industrial engineering at the McCormick School of Engineering, will receive $647,173 over five years from the NSF’s Division of Computing and Communication Foundations.
Greenfeld, an assistant professor of mathematics at Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, will receive $567,061 over five years from the NSF’s Division of Mathematical Sciences.
Kovács, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Weinberg, will receive $813,662 over five years from the NSF’s Division of Physics.
The CAREER Award is designed to support promising young faculty members who exemplify the role of teacher-scholar through the combination of outstanding research and education.
This year’s honorees
Julia Gaudio focuses on high-dimensional probability with an emphasis on network inference and network reconstruction problems, an interdisciplinary field involving researchers in computer science, operations research, statistics, applied mathematics and statistical physics.
With her CAREER award, “Discovering Hidden Structure in Networks: Algorithms and Barriers,” Gaudio will study several directions aimed at advancing foundational contributions to inference and reconstruction problems on networks. Foundational research on network inference is aligned with one of the NSF 10 Big Ideas: Harnessing the Data Revolution, with the goal of developing fundamental tools in data science, to benefit from large-scale data, and to train a data-literate workforce.
“The data revolution has brought with it historically unprecedented volumes of high-dimensional data, much of it in the form of networks,” Gaudio said. “Across scientific disciplines, there is a pressing need to develop foundational tools for processing high-dimensional network data and making inferences.”
Gaudio has partnered with the Kohl Children's Museum of Greater Chicago to develop exhibits and programming for young children and will further engage with the public through the media.
Rachel Greenfeld studies harmonic analysis, arithmetic combinatorics and discrete geometry. In this work, she uncovers hidden — and surprising — relationships among numbers, shapes and patterns.
With her CAREER award, “Structure Theory in Additive Combinatorics and Symbolic Dynamics,” Greenfeld seeks to better understand tilings — the various ways shapes can be arranged to cover a surface. Greenfeld is particularly interested in understanding why some tiling patterns are highly organized and predictable, while others are unpredictable and chaotic. As part of her project, she will develop new mathematical tools to understand the difference between structured and wild tilings and then will adapt these tools to study related problems.
“I am very honored to receive the NSF CAREER award,” Greenfeld said. “This project aims to explore new connections between analysis, combinatorics, dynamics and number theory, and I’m excited about the research and training opportunities it will create.”
Greenfeld also will mentor students and organize events, including seminars, conferences and workshops.
In his research, István Kovács seeks to bridge the gaps between structure and function in complex systems. Working in close collaboration with experimental researchers, his group develops theoretical methodologies to predict the emerging structural and functional patterns in a wide range of problems — from systems biology to quantum physics.
With his CAREER award, “Network-based Inference of Complex Biological Interactions,” Kovács will use statistical physics techniques to develop models for complex interactions that involve three or more factors. While researchers have a strong grasp on how two things interact due to network models — such as one gene with another gene or one gene with an environmental factor — they struggle to understand the complex interplay of multiple factors interacting at once. Through modeling, Kovács aims to predict how combinations of genetic changes and environmental factors affect how an organism functions. The findings eventually could help lead to a better understanding of complex diseases, like cancer, and pave the way for designing more effective treatments, including targeted drug combinations.
“I am deeply honored to receive the NSF CAREER award,” Kovács said. “This prestigious award will allow my research group to systematically pursue how biological phenotypes are impacted by multiple genetic and environmental factors, in synergy with our ongoing educational efforts to broaden the understanding of the usefulness and aesthetic beauty of complex networks.”
Kovács also will lead high school outreach activities and a community effort to organize art exhibitions to showcase the hidden patterns within biological networks.
