Philip E. Par, Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Philip E. Paré, assistant professor in Purdue University’s Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, has received a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award. These prestigious awards are in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through research and education, and the integration of these endeavors in the context of their organizations' missions. The awards, presented once each year, include a federal grant for research and education activities for five consecutive years.

"I am honored and excited to receive this award from the National Science Foundation,” said Paré. “I'm looking forward to further building my research group, working on interesting and impactful problems, and increasing my outreach outside the university environment."

Paré’s grant will support a project entitled “Learning, Estimation, and Control of Networked Epidemic Processes.” This project will explore how and when to use mathematical models combined with data to predict and mitigate spread in networked systems such as an epidemic spreading across a population, misinformation in a social network, unbalance in ecological networks, viruses in computer networks, etc. The proposed research will establish a set of fundamental theories, tools, and algorithms to model, learn, and control real-time epidemic spreading processes by leveraging multiple live data streams while evaluating the trade-off between model-based and data-driven approaches. This research will help provide insights for decision makers, such as politicians, public health officials, administrators, and business leaders, to better mitigate future disease outbreaks as well as provide insights for other motivating applications.