Iowa State University announced four new big-data research projects that will receive $1.65 million in seed funding as part of an initiative launched in 2012 by ISU President Steven Leath.

The third round of funding for the initiative will build four research teams that will use big data to benefit human and animal health, improve cities and build new tools for researchers.

The Presidential Initiative for Interdisciplinary Research program provides seed funding to establish research teams from across the campus to tackle emerging societal challenges. The goal is to help the teams grow into well-funded, cross-disciplinary research groups.

So far, the presidential research initiative has launched research teams made up of more than 100 Iowa State faculty members from five colleges. The teams have attracted $42.6 million in external funding for projects in next-generation vaccines, agricultural production, data accessibility and big-data projects advancing health and communities.

“We launched this initiative four years ago with the intent of creating a new culture of collaborative research at Iowa State, a culture of thinking big,” Leath said. “These latest projects in big-data science are great examples of that. We’ll have teams of researchers from across campus taking on brain disease and swine flu while others develop cyber infrastructures and sustainable cities. Thinking big like this is how we’ll live up to our mission of creating, sharing and applying knowledge to improve our state and world.”

The latest projects to win the initiative’s support are:

• Big Data Brain Initiative, a three-year, $450,000 project that will use big data to develop new treatments for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases. The researchers will use large data sets about Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s patients to identify new biomarkers that indicate risk for developing neurodegenerative diseases and track their progression.
• Invention and Refinement of Shared Data-Science Infrastructures, a three-year, $450,000 project that will create data-science infrastructures that open the door to big-data analysis for researchers. The researchers’ initial cyber infrastructures will help researchers improve traffic and air safety and better understand how biological systems work and evolve.
• Characterizing, Monitoring and Rapidly Recognizing Emerging Swine Influenza Through Data-Driven Science, a three-year, $375,000 project for a multidisciplinary team to develop new bioinformatics tools for real-time tracking of flu in swine. The goal is to improve animal health and welfare, protect human health, and secure the food supply.
• Data-Driven Decision Making for Sustainable Cities, a three-year, $375,000 project that will use data about living in urban areas to develop new methods to help cities make data-driven policy decisions that are sustainable and meet residents’ needs.