Congratulations goes to Ping Chen, professor of computer and mathematical sciences, for receiving a three-year, $321,281 research grant from the National Institute of Health (NIH).

The NIH, a part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, is the nation's medical research agency and the largest source of funding for medical research in the world.

According to Chen, his research project, Efficient Discovery of Medical Associations, "aims to design and rigorously test an efficient medical association discovery algorithm to effectively extract non-trivial, validated, non-redundant, and previously unknown health-related associations (risk factors) from large real-world medical datasets. These risk factors will provide valuable reasoning and modeling mechanism that are critically important to the foundation of medical and health research. Additionally, health-related associations can also provide basis for clinical decision making, public health policy, and other important public health fields including health guidance that can directly promote and improve the health of individuals, families, communities and populations."

Chen is also the director of UHD's Artificial Intelligence Lab. His other research interests include developing systems and techniques that analyze data and natural languages, medical data mining and automated disease diagnosis analysis among others.

Ping Chen, professor, is shown with former UHD student David Hinote after tying for first place in a computer science competition.