This year, the Data Science Institute launched an Early Career Breakthrough Research Awards program to recognize the contributions and professional growth of Brown's early career faculty members working in the area of or areas adjacent to data science. The recipients receive a $2,000 award to use as discretionary research or teaching funds.

After a nomination process this fall and the review of a DSI committee, we are pleased to announce that the inaugural awards go to the following young researchers at Brown:

• In the Biological Sciences:  Ying Ma, Edens Family Assistant Professor of Healthcare Communications and Technology and Assistant Professor of Biostatistics
• In the Physical Sciences & Engineering: Loukas Gouskos, Christopher M. Barter Assistant Professor of Physics
• In the Humanities & Social Sciences: Kim Fernandes, Assistant Professor of Anthropology

The DSI Early Career Research Award for Biological Sciences recognizes Ying Ma (Edens Family Assistant Professor of Healthcare Communications and Technology and Assistant Professor of Biostatistics) for effectively leveraging data science tools to propel research and innovation in Biostatistics and Computational Biology. Ying Ma’s scholarship sits at the intersection of statistics, machine learning, and biological discovery and provides a crucial link across disciplines at Brown. Her research has created a data-science foundation for spatial biology, with novel contributions like the first spatially informed cell-type deconvolution method and the first reference-informed method for tissue segmentation. These innovations develop rigorous, interpretable methods for high-dimensional biomedical data, leading to real-world impact and accelerating discovery in cancer, neuroscience, and immunology. 

The DSI Early Career Research Award for Physical Sciences recognizes Loukas Gouskos (Christopher M. Barter Assistant Professor of Physics) for his exceptional, end-to-end impact in transforming High Energy Physics through data science. Loukas Gouskos’s work is exemplified by the creation of ParticleNet, a graph-neural network that reframed jet identification at the Large Hadron Collider and has become one of the most influential method papers in the field. His approach integrates physics knowledge into learning architectures to push previously “impossible” measurements, like the Higgs–charm quark interaction and di-Higgs searches, toward reality. He not only invents the algorithms but also co-designs their deployment for microsecond-scale, high-consequence decisions in the detector data stream, tackling complexity orders of magnitude greater than everyday data.

The DSI Early Career Research Award for Social Sciences recognizes Kim Fernandes (Assistant Professor of Anthropology) for their impactful work at the intersection of Anthropology, Demography, and Data Science. Kim Fernandes’s rigorous ethnographic fieldwork on disability, data, and education in India – funded by a highly competitive external award – is making significant progress toward understanding populations often considered “hard to count.” Their combined training in cultural anthropology and graduate-level statistics positions them exceptionally well to leverage the tools of data science to address fundamental questions about who “counts” and under what circumstances.

We look forward to honoring these award recipients and their achievements at the DSI Award Recipient Celebration on January 14th at 4:00pm at 164 Angell Street. 

This award ceremony will also honor the 2026 Data Science Seed Grant recipients, to be announced in the coming weeks.