Two CWRU engineering researchers receive early career awards from National Science Foundation

(Press-News.org) Two Case Western Reserve University engineering faculty have been awarded National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) grants. 



Computer scientist An Wang and environmental engineer Bridget Hegarty were each awarded a five-year grant to support their research programs. Hegarty also received a $1 million grant from the Department of Housing and Urban Development.



“These two faculty members pursue two very different lines of research, one around democratizing advanced machine learning capabilities and the other around protecting public health by safely and efficiently controlling the growth of unwanted bacteria in our water systems,” said Venkataramanan “Ragu” Balakrishnan, Charles H. Phipps Dean of the Case School of Engineering. “They are united in their innovative, interdisciplinary approach to advancing science for the public good.”



The CAREER award is considered the agency’s most prestigious grant to junior faculty members “who 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.”



An Wang

Wang, assistant professor in computer and data science, will use her CAREER Award to advance a new area of research: Leveraging resources from different cloud-computing providers to maximize the efficiency and minimize the cost of training machine-learning models, or algorithms.



An Wang



Machine learning mimics how humans learn, analyzing data to learn patterns and make predictions to minimize human input for decision-making. But they have to be “trained” on large amounts of data, she said, which often rely on distributed computing systems.



“The server machines involved in training need to synchronize and communicate with each other and exchange a lot of data,” Wang said. “So, typically, the communication part becomes the bottleneck because the network capacity is not as fast as the processors.”



Wang, who has taught at CWRU since 2018, addresses challenges or problems in distributed learning by better leveraging the strengths of different platforms–like Apple Cloud or Google Cloud or Amazon–to cost-effectively train models. 



She treats it as a multi-layered optimization problem. “It’s not just the cost, it’s the quality of the data,” she said. “Not all the data are equally important during training, so for the less important ones, we can allocate fewer resources while focusing on the more important ones.”



She said all of her findings will be made publicly available and open-source so anyone can use the tools to develop new applications for machine learning. 



“The CAREER award is definitely a milestone and gives me the resources to expand my research into a relatively new area that’s different from what I have been working on,” she said. “And it gives me the opportunity to grow as a scholar and, I hope, a future leader.”



Bridget Hegarty

Hegarty’s research focuses on microbiomes, with applications from indoor air quality to drinking water safety. The CAREER Award will support her lab to develop safe and effective biocontrol for water systems using bacteriophages, or “phages.” These viruses target and kill specific types of bacteria.



Bridget Hegarty



Unwanted or toxic bacteria sometimes form biofilms, Hegarty said, which are layers of bacteria on surfaces that can be impenetrable to antibiotics and disinfectants. Hegarty, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering who started at CWRU in 2022, said water could be treated with phage “cocktails,” mixtures of phages targeted to kill the toxic bacteria in a way that is not harmful to either beneficial bacteria or human health.



This might be useful, for example, in disinfecting sinks in hospitals. The drainpipe can form a biofilm of harmful bacteria that can contaminate the whole room, infecting the occupants.



Pouring bleach down the sink will kill all the bacteria, leaving the pipe available for colonization by other bacteria, she said. In a hospital, these new bacteria could be even more toxic or carry antibiotic resistance genes. 



A targeted phage cocktail could be dispersed in a liquid that might be poured down the sink; or the phages could be embedded in the material of the pipe itself, preventing bacteria from colonizing the surface in the first place, Hegarty said. 



Phages have been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for use in food products to prevent toxic bacteria, like salmonella and listeria, from growing on packaging. And before antibiotics, phages were used to treat bacterial infections in humans, and are still used in some countries. With the rise of antibiotic resistance, there is renewed interest in exploring phages in the U.S.



Hegarty is now identifying and cataloguing beneficial phages from compost, soil, wastewater, or water. Undergraduate students (she has 10 working in her lab) are a critical component of this work.



She is focused on better understanding the interactions between the phages and their hosts. “Right now,” she said, “it’s trial and error. The process is slow and we don’t understand why those phages or phage cocktails work.” She hopes to uncover why some combinations of phages are more effective than others, speeding up the process of phage cocktail design.



Additional grant for improving indoor air quality

Hegarty has also been awarded a $1 million grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to investigate whether remediating indoor-air quality improves the health of children with asthma.



Hegarty’s HUD grant was awarded in collaboration with the Cleveland Clinic, the University of Toronto and Environmental Health Watch. It is aimed at helping children with asthma, particularly in neighborhoods negatively affected by environmental injustice. Hegarty will assess the microbiome in an afflicted child's home, connecting changes with indoor conditions like humidity and asthma outcomes.



Sixty homes will be enrolled in the study; half will receive remediation to address mold, pests or plumbing issues that contribute to poor air quality. The children’s health will be reassessed to see if remediation improves their asthma.

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