University of Chicago partners with UIC, other regional Universities and Research to create new Institute for Mathematical and Statistical Innovation with 15.5 Million USD NSF grant
Mathematicians and statisticians from the University of Illinois at Chicago will join a collaborative group of researchers representing three other leading research universities in Illinois as part of the new Institute for Mathematical and Statistical Innovation (IMSI). Funded with a five-year, 15.5 million USD grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the University of Chicago-based institute aims to bring powerful mathematical ideas to bear on key contemporary scientific and technological challenges, while enriching scientific research and workforce development in Chicago and the state of Illinois.
The researchers from UIC, University of Chicago, Northwestern University, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will build a program that accelerates the translation of applied mathematical and statistical techniques into solutions for urgent scientific and societal problems. Many of these problems arise naturally in a range of fields already being studied across the four partner institutions, including climate change, health care, quantum information theory, artificial intelligence, data science, economics, and materials science. The Institute for Mathematical and Statistical Innovation will serve as a national platform for research, outreach, and workforce development to train the next generation of researchers in mathematics and statistics, and bring together researchers from across the nation and around the globe.
Scientific activity at the institute will include workshops and long programs, typically 10 weeks in length. Research activity will be organized around themes that will evolve over time, with an initial focus on data and information, climate science, health care, material science, quantum computing and information, and uncertainty quantification. Amongst other things, the new institute should offer expanded internship opportunities for graduate students in Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science.
The institute's associate director position will rotate among the four institutions with data scientist Professor Yichao Wu, TransUnion Professor at UIC and director of multidisciplinary research in data science in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, slated to serve in that role from 2022 to 2024.
Brooke Shipley, UIC Professor and Head of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science is a co-principal investigator of the grant and will serve on the IMSI Board of Trustees.
Read more about the new institute in the UIC Today article or visit the IMSE website.