Huan Receives NSF CAREER Award

Assistant Professor Luke Huan has been awarded a $500,000 Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) grant from the National Science Foundation. The prestigious CAREER award supports junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars. Huan is the second EECS professor to receive the honor; Associate Professor Xue-wen Chenreceived a CAREER award in 2007. 

With the NSF support, Huan is developing advanced data mining and machine learning theory and algorithms to identify stable patterns in data. Working with collaborators in academia, industry and governmental agencies, Huan is applying the computational techniques to improve the quality of the interpretation of data collected for chemical interactions with biological systems. This research is expected to accelerate drug discovery with a simplified and focused drug design process and improve chemical toxicity monitoring in environmental protection, two major application areas of Huan's research.

Huan joined the Department in 2006. He is an affiliated member of the Information and Telecommunication Technology Center (ITTC), Bioinformatics Center, Bioengineering Program and the Center for Biostatistics and Advanced Informatics—all KU research organizations. He received his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2006. Before coming to KU, he worked at the Argonne National Laboratory and GlaxoSmithKline.