Lin Receives Pilot Award in Health Analytics from Goergen Institute for Data Science

Feng Vankee Lin, PhD, RN, was recently awarded a Collaborative Pilot Award in Health Analytics from the University of Rochester’s Goergen Institute for Data Science.

Lin, an assistant professor at the UR School of Nursing, is principal investigator on a one-year project which will use big data in an effort to develop an algorithm for predicting Alzheimer’s disease. The project will analyze large brain-imaging datasets and use multiple machine-learning approaches to uncover diagnostic patterns and create a more reliable predictive model for detecting Alzheimer’s disease.

“I’m grateful for this award and the opportunity to take my research in an exciting new direction,” said Lin. “It will help initiate a new research area focusing on neuroimaging methodology development in relation to Alzheimer’s disease.”

The award includes a $35,000 grant for the project, which runs from Feb. 1, 2017 to Jan. 31, 2018. Rajeev Raizada, PhD, assistant professor of brain and cognitive sciences, is co-principal investigator on the project.

Located in Wegmans Hall, the Goergen Institute for Data Science is a hub for interdisciplinary data science research. Its work in health analytics – using data to predict individual health outcomes – includes advances in using data to help analyze the brain more effectively and sharing the data with other researchers to discover more ways to improve outcomes for patients.