Artificial intelligence is transforming the world—but how did we get here, and where are we going next?

Together, the College of Science Departments of Mathematics and Statistics, the College of Engineering Computer Science program and the Oregon State Center for Quantitative Life Sciences present the 2025 Milne Lecture.

Join us to hear Rachel Ward, an applied mathematician known for her work on machine learning, optimization and signal processing from the University of Texas at Austin and Microsoft Research, share a talk titled,

“From bits to bots: a mathematical perspective on generative AI.”

Data science and machine learning have undergone profound transformations in recent years, driven by the exponential growth of computational power and available data. In this talk, Ward will discuss the evolution from signal processing over half a century ago to the rise of machine learning and generative AI, highlighting mathematical foundations such as information theory, probability, linear algebra, and optimization. While modern AI research is becoming more empirical in recent years, we finish by highlighting open questions and directions where mathematicians and scientists are crucial for making foundational advancements.

In 1977, Steve Stehman (statistics, ‘82) was a junior at Penn State University studying biology. An independent study course had him knee deep in the streams of Centre County, Pennsylvania, collecting diatoms — tiny, unicellular photosynthesizing algae.

As he began to analyze his mountain of data, he quickly realized he was in over his head. This led him to enroll in a few statistics courses, where he discovered the powerful mutualistic relationship between biology and statistics.

Those tiny microscopic organisms changed the course of his life and put him on a path to the Department of Statistics at Oregon State, a place he believes stays one step ahead of the scientific trends and prepares students for every career outcome.

Today, as a Distinguished Teaching Professor at the State University of New York (SUNY) College of Environmental Science and Forestry, Stehman honors his roots by giving back to Oregon State. His contributions recognize the invaluable education he received and pay tribute to one very special faculty member.

OSU connections shaped a path to success

Oregon State was one of a few schools on a short list Stehman created for master’s degree options. Faculty at Penn State recommended OSU as a place where statistics and the environment were already coming together, something that wasn’t true at most universities.

“It has been a strength of the department for the last 50 or so years and I’m biased in my opinion, but I think they’re still one of the top places for combining the environment and statistics,” he said. “They have been very successful in being innovative and right at the front of changes that have occurred over the last few decades.”

A scholarship offer that covered his first year of tuition sealed the deal and he packed his bags to move across the country.

Once he arrived at Oregon State, he quickly found a sense of community, thanks to W. Scott Overton, a faculty member with a joint appointment with the forestry college. Overton’s academic career spanned a range of topics including wildlife, forestry, statistics, ecology, conservation and environmental issues. He was a pioneer in the application of hierarchy theory to ecosystem theory and modeling. His statistical specialty was sampling theory and design, with applications to environmental issues and monitoring programs.

Overton served as Stehman’s master’s advisor and along with his wife Joanne, he helped numerous graduate students feel at home.

“They had students out to their house for dinners and long discussions about statistics or life,” Stehman said. “That family relationship they invited people into, for me, was very helpful.”

When Stehman left Corvallis in 1983 to pursue a Ph.D. in Biometry at Cornell University, Overton still played a role in his education, receiving special permission to serve as his dissertation advisor.

“I get to learn about research and work with people who are addressing what I think are important problems.”

At the time, Overton was working closely with the Environmental Protection Agency, making major contributions to several aspects of the EPA’s National Surface Water Surveys conducted during the 1980’s and to the EPA’s Environmental Monitoring and Assessment Program (EMAP). Stehman worked with Overton on some of his research questions that had a direct environmental impact.

“I have always liked that I can ask researchers a lot of questions and learn about all these different things in the environment that otherwise I wouldn’t know about. You’re talking directly to an expert about their work, and they allow dumb questions because they recognize I don’t understand what they are doing,” Stehman said. “I get to learn about research and work with people who are addressing what I think are important problems.”

In 1989 he accepted a teaching position at SUNY in the Department of Sustainable Resource Management. Teaching wasn’t on his radar until his time at Oregon State. One of his degree responsibilities was spending one quarter as a teaching assistant.

“I put that off until my very last quarter because I wasn’t planning on being a teacher, but I had such a good experience that it was the spark for me to change directions and I decided it was something I was really interested in,” he said.

Stehman teaches sampling techniques, map accuracy assessment and experiment design and analysis of variance. These classes align with his passion for analyzing land cover mapping with satellite data. Although this type of work requires a narrow area of statistics, Stehman likes how it addresses problems with huge impact such as deforestation or changes in surface water availability.

“I’ve had a very narrow career specialized in that area, but these were the problems I wanted to work on. It’s been a lucky but perfect match of my interests and the work people are doing,” he said.

Once again, he owes it all to Overton. In 1989, before he left to teach back east, Stehman took a consulting job that Overton was offered but didn’t have time for. He spent the first three weeks of January in Fairbanks, Alaska, working with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to assess the accuracy of vegetation maps derived from satellite imagery.

“To validate maps you select a small set of areas as a sample and then do very intensive work to try and see what exactly is there as close to the truth and then compare it to the map. There has been a lot of work over the years to try and do it more efficiently and accurately,” Stehman said.

In 2016, Stehman was named the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry exemplary researcher for his outstanding research career and unsurpassed knowledge in his field of study.

Attending Oregon State helped Stehman narrow his field of study and develop a love of teaching, two things that would later define his entire career.

“It really did change things for me and put me on a career path I don’t think I ever would have started,” he said.

The College of Science has a diverse portfolio of signature research, scholarship and innovation activities that enable our College to make fundamental and applied discoveries. To support society’s scientific challenges, we are invested in discovery-driven science and applied and transdisciplinary research. Our research intersects with all four research areas of priority outlined in OSU’s strategic plan, Prosperity Widely Shared.

Over the 2024 fiscal year (FY24: July 1, 2023 - June 30, 2024), the College of Science researchers received $18.5 million in research grants to support groundbreaking science. Most of that funding came from federal agencies and foundations in recognition of proposals with broad societal impacts, like increased human health, sustainable and clean energy and climate change mitigation. Our faculty pursue foundational and basic research projects and science education projects. Data science and Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools are increasingly becoming part of the fabric of much of our research. College of Science research expenditures in FY24 totaled $20.7 million.

The figure below illustrates the breakdown of funding sources for the College, with the National Science Foundation (NSF) and National Institutes of Health (NIH) each awarding about $5.1M.

In West Virginia, Mary Tunstall once avoided the New River’s dangerous rapids at all costs. After all, if the raft flipped, she’d be responsible. But being a whitewater raft guide right out of high school taught her something more important: how to say, “I can do this” to overcome obstacles.

Like the river, Tunstall’s career journey roared with twists and turns. After graduating from the University of Virginia in 2009 with her bachelor’s in environmental science, she landed an internship with the U.S. Forest Service right outside of Vail, Colorado.

The draw of snowboarding in the cold and crisp Rocky Mountain snow kept her and her husband sticking around. Her journey snowballed when she found herself working the front desk at Manor Vail Lodge, a popular resort hotel with its own restaurant, outdoor pool, garden and luxury bar. Little did she know she would climb the ladder nine years later.

In 2018, Tunstall and her husband made the move to Toledo, Oregon to be closer to family. By working remotely for the same hotel as director of revenue and reservations, she had the flexibility to focus on her education.

When she discovered that Oregon State University offered a fully online master’s program in data analytics that could help her make a bigger impact in her career, she decided to take the plunge.

This article originally appeared in the Oregon State University Stater Spring 2024 magazine. Read the full spread highlighting lessons from the pandemic across Oregon State, starting on page 42.

Cities are like organisms — they need immune systems.

Viruses can reproduce rapidly, taking over cells and turning them into viral factories within hours. Individuals' immune systems need to rise to the challenge, but what happens when they can't, and a whole population gets sick?

As the early days of the pandemic demonstrated, cities can struggle to stop the momentum of a spreading disease. Armed with community input and lessons learned over the past four years, a multidisciplinary team of researchers at Oregon State University is designing city-scale feedback loops to act as a kind of immune system for a population as a whole.

"We believe future cities will give people access to real-time local data on infection risk," said ecologist Benjamin Dalziel, project leader. "You'll be able to use that information in your daily life, like how you use a weather report. The more people do that, the slower the spread will be."

The team is supported by $1 million from the National Science Foundation through its Predictive Intelligence for Pandemic Prevention Program (PIPP).

The project began in 2022 with a series of workshops in cities across Oregon. "One key that communities stressed was the importance of sharing timely data between different groups and organizations — much like how different systems in the body communicate to mount an immune response," said team member Katherine McLaughlin, an applied statistician.

The researchers aim to establish a center at OSU that combines mathematical and computational modeling with engineering, public health and public engagement. The Center for Pandemic-Resilient Cities (CPARC; pronounced like "spark") will prototype city-scale feedback loops that link environmental monitoring with epidemic forecasting and communication, so responders won't have to play catchup after an outbreak begins.

Led by the College of Science, the effort capitalizes on OSU's strong tradition of multidisciplinary work and includes six university colleges. In the College of Engineering, Tyler Radniecki and Christine Kelly are developing innovations in wastewater sensing, a low-cost method of monitoring that involves testing sewage samples for disease.

Teams from the College of Health and OSU Extension and Engagement are working to ensure that the science incorporates the characteristics of different communities. For example, responders in cities with a lot of tourism need to know whether infection is spreading locally, such as within schools, or is arriving from other cities, as responses will be different in each case.

Faculty from the College of Liberal Arts (Daniel Faltesek) are researching how to use interactive media to communicate infectious disease forecasts to people in the city, to close the loop between prediction and prevention.

"Human systems, like cities, can be very good at making things 'go viral,'" said project leader Dalziel. "Using mathematics, engineering and community engagement, we can develop systems that make helpful responses go viral, too."

Statistics often operates behind the scenes. It’s a field whose results are used in the analyses of papers from physics to psychology, yet its power is not widely understood.

Associate Professor Sharmodeep Bhattacharyya wants to change that. He straddles the world of highly theoretical statistics—the foundational mathematics of statistics—and the application of statistics to other areas of science.

"Scientists in different fields should be more mindful of the statistics that they are trying to use because statistics are misrepresented and misused alarmingly often," Bhattacharyya said.

Understanding the brain

With collaborator Kristofer Bouchard, a scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Bhattacharyya is currently examining the statistics of brain data measured using electrodes. The pair looked at data collected from placing electrodes on the exposed brains of lab rats, a process known as electrocorticography.

The data generated from those experiments is very high-dimensional, which in the context of math formalizes the concept of degree of freedom, something that can take on a value. In our everyday experience, we're used to thinking of ourselves as existing in three-dimensional space, where the coordinates–often called x, y and z–are our degrees of freedom. If you were unable to move freely in all three spatial directions and were instead constrained to walking along a rope, you would only have one degree of freedom and move only in one dimension.

In the brain data that Bhattacharyya and his collaborators examine, each dimension corresponds to the state of a specific neuron. Thinking of a neuron like a switch, a state would be whether or not it's on or off. But when a large portion of brain has to be studied the number of neurons present is multiplied, leading to a high-dimensional situation.

Given how many neurons there are in a small piece of rat brain, the experiments Bhattacharyya has looked at have thousands of dimensions.

Additionally, neurons "talk" to each other, forming a network. The activation of neurons also comes in waves and pulses, making the data sparse. These qualities make brain electrode data prime for the application of statistical techniques to find meaningful patterns.

Bhattacharyya's work on this project, and in general, is focused on the building of frameworks and understanding of methods. In the realm of theory, it can be a challenge to prove why a result that appears simple on the surface is true, or why a seemingly simple method works. Theoretical rigor makes a method reliable and allows practitioners from different domains to adapt the method smoothly. It also widens the scope of the method within the Statistics community itself.

When analyzing networks, community detection is important. A community is just what it sounds like; a group of interconnected people. For neurons, communities would be regions of the brain where neurons are tightly connected.

In the world of networks, neurons could be represented by what are known as ‘nodes’, while the connections between nodes are ‘edges’. For example, imagine a street grid, the intersections would be nodes, and the streets between them edges. The concept of communities is then generalized to include any group of nodes that are highly interconnected.

Detecting communities in networks isn't always obvious, especially for sparse networks. However, Bhattacharyya found a surprisingly straightforward method of community detection that works wonders at just this.

"It's a very simple method, but proving that this method works was not easy, so that took me quite a bit of time," he said.

Bhattacharyya has also worked with collaborators on public health policies, social networks and gene regulatory networks. These collaborations have offered him the opportunity to introduce fellow scientists to statistical methods, demystifying the perception of statistics as a black box.

"I'm very much interested in interdisciplinary work, specifically because I get to learn about a new field, as well as try to see how I can contribute to that field."

Every dataset is full of surprises, and that is one of the great wonders of statistics. It is also why all scientists need to understand statistics so they can apply the appropriate methods for their data, or find someone who can.

Guided by the data

Bhattacharyya grew up in the city of Kolkata, India. There, he completed his bachelor's and master's degrees at the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) in 2006 and 2008 respectively. The ISI was founded in 1931 by statistician Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis and is India's premier institute of higher education when it comes to the training of statisticians.

He completed his Ph.D. and postdoctoral program at UC Berkeley with statistics professor Peter Bickel. A pioneer of statistical methods, particularly in what are known as semiparametric models, Bickel is still publishing papers despite being semi-retired.

"Last year, we had his 80th birthday celebration conference at Berkeley, and several of his Ph.D. students who are now big shots in statistics attended. It was a very nice conference," Bhattacharyya said.

By the time Bhattacharyya completed his Ph.D. in 2013, Bickel had been in the field for 50 years. Bhattacharyya credits his current success to the wisdom, knowledge and experience his mentor shared with him. Bickel emphasized the importance of statistics always being guided by the data, with research questions informed by what the data says and what would benefit the broader statistics community.

Bhattacharyya’s transition to the Department of Statistics was a welcomed one. Although he grew up in a sprawling metropolis of 14 million people and completed his Ph.D. and postdoc in a city of four million, he always preferred the quiet life of the country and small cities. In part, it was a desire to get away from the hustle and bustle that brought Bhattacharyya to Corvallis.

The Department of Statistics encourages interdisciplinary research alongside more theoretical research, something Bhattacharyya holds in high regard. He also appreciated the incredibly welcoming department culture.

"I'm very much interested in interdisciplinary work, specifically because I get to learn about a new field, as well as try to see how I can contribute to that field," he said.

Outside of academics, Bhattacharyya enjoys listening to classical Indian music, reading fiction and non-fiction, and of course spending time with his wife. She is also a statistician who completed her Ph.D. at Oregon State.

Imagine working for the Department of Motor Vehicles, not as a desk clerk or driving test administrator, but at the central office in Salem. Imagine that you were tasked with ascertaining how best to allocate fuel tax revenue. This revenue comes from the tax on fuel purchased for cars and trucks, marine boats, off-highway vehicles and other motorized vehicles. How would you go about distributing the revenue to the agencies responsible for these vehicles?

A survey to determine the fuel used in each category might be a good option, but where to begin? The Oregon State University Survey Research Center is ready to help. Since 1973 the Survey Research Center (SRC) has been working with Oregon State faculty and state government agencies to help them conduct and analyze surveys.

In addition to working with more than 15 different agencies in Salem including the Oregon Department of Transportation, Oregon State Marine Board and Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, the SRC has worked with Oregon State University faculty and staff on a variety of projects. Examples range from investigations in applied economics to surveys of students graduating from the College of Science.

"It's fascinating because I learned so much about the state for each survey we work with," said Virginia Lesser, head of the Survey Research Center.

The art of survey design

The process of survey design involves first working with the client to determine the budget and the population to be surveyed. Throughout the entire process there is constant back and forth with the client to figure out exactly what they want and what is possible.

Sometimes clients come in looking to survey a specific segment of the population, such as people who use their service. However, there is often no way of knowing exactly who comprises that population. An important component in designing surveys is to determine and accurately define the population from which the results are gathered. In order to obtain measures of confidence around any estimates, probability sampling must be used.

With probability sampling, every member of the population has an equal chance of being surveyed because they are drawn from a random distribution.

In contrast, non-probability sampling involves selecting from a non-random distribution, such as those who seek out a survey to participate in. Due to the lack of a random selection of individuals, it's impossible to identify biases or compute other measurements. Therefore, data collected using non-probability sampling should be interpreted with caution due to the impact of selection bias.

"So the challenge I have is working with a client to figure out how to get the opinions they need when they don't know who the people are that use their service," Lesser said.

Once the population has been selected, there are three primary components to designing a survey: writing the questions, selecting the probability samples and correctly analyzing the survey data. Writing questions is a bit of an art. Good survey questions should be both unbiased and flow well within a questionnaire. The sample selection depends on the population one is looking to reach and the sampling design. The statistical analysis methods must account for the sampling design and any survey errors, such as nonresponse.

The future of survey distribution

Survey administration methods have evolved significantly over the last several years. Phone-based surveys are not used as much as they were 20 years ago due to the low response rates. Web surveys have become more prominent.

Today the Survey Research Center conducts most of its probability-based surveys using a hybrid web and mail approach, combining the usability of the internet with the higher quality and response rates of mail. This ensures reaching a wider array of demographics than either form would alone.

A key advantage of mail-based surveys is that one can easily mail out surveys to every address or a random sample of addresses in an area. The list of addresses used to select the probability samples for SRC surveys covers nearly 100% of all households in the US. The hybrid web and mail approach provides the opportunity for all selected households to respond either by mail or by web. Thus not all households need to have internet access.

Another method to contact survey participants uses email addresses. Email-based surveys may also be used in cases where the SRC or the client knows the email addresses for the population and know that all potential participants have access to email, for example surveys of Oregon State faculty and students.

Increasingly, more surveys are being conducted using non-probability online panels. These panels are composed of people volunteering to complete surveys in exchange for remuneration or other benefits. They have become popular in recent years due to how cheaply and easily they can be used to get relatively large samples. However, the individuals from an online panel who complete a survey are not a random sample of the population. These respondents choose to actively participate because of personal interest, or because of some sort of incentive, such as a gift card.

Due to their self-selecting nature, estimates from non-probability panel surveys tend to be biased as compared to results from probability sampling methods. Relying on non-probability panels for unbiased information would be like relying on a jury entirely made up of people who really want to be on it.

In addition to its work helping others conduct surveys, the Survey Research Center staff also conduct original research. The main focus of their research is on comparing the effectiveness of different survey techniques, studying how even minute details such as envelope color and size, incentives and content of cover letters impact response rates.

Survey response rates continue to decrease and the research conducted by the SRC examines methods to improve response rates in their surveys. Recently, one of Lesser’s graduate students has been working on how to combine probability and non-probability samples, and thus how to integrate the two approaches.

In our ever-changing social and technological landscape, keeping a finger on the pulse of public opinion is vital. The behind-the-scenes work of designing survey questions and researching survey methods is just as vital. For the past 50 years, the Survey Research Center has done both, through their original research and the services they provided to their clients within and without Oregon State University.

Four-dimensional tissue self-assembly, integrated river health and ultra-tiny spectrometers: The 2022 College of Science Research and Innovation Seed (SciRIS) award recipients will use collaboration to fill critical knowledge gaps across numerous scientific disciplines to drive real-world impact.

The SciRIS program funds projects based on collaborative research within the College of Science community and beyond. There are two tracks through the program: SciRIS (Stages 1-3) and the SciRIS individual investigator award (SciRIS-ii).

SciRIS Stages 1-3 funds teams in three stages of increasing funding to support training, research and capacity-building, accelerating work toward external funding opportunities. SciRIS-ii funds individual faculty to establish research relationships with external partners, enabling them to demonstrate the feasibility of their ideas and quickening the pace of scientific discovery.

SciRIS-ii Awardees

The following three scientists received SciRIS-ii awards: Bo Sun, Clayton Petsche and Ethan Minot.

Associate Professor of Physics Bo Sun’s research aims to lay the foundation for programmable four-dimensional tissue self-assembly. Current technologies have been unable to harness these naturally occurring processes to assemble dynamic tissue structures for biomedical and therapeutic applications. Four-dimensional tissue self-assembly is critical for many physiological processes including acute wound healing and in lethal tumor metastasis.

Sun and his collaborator, Yang Jiao from Arizona State University, will be building on eight years of collaborative research in the field of cell mechanics and cell migration that has resulted in eight publications.

Associate Professor of Mathematics Clayton Petsche will use his SciRIS grant to help three graduate students complete sub projects within the realm of arithmetic dynamical systems. The research will be entirely student-focused and will help establish their research credentials before entering the postdoctoral job market.

Professor of Physics Ethan Minot will use his award to bring ultra-miniaturized spectrometer technology to Oregon State and pursue follow-up opportunities.

In 2022, with co-authors from Finland, Minot was part of a study published in Science that resulted in a powerful, ultra-tiny spectrometer. Contributing to a field known as optical spectrometry, their discovery could improve everything from smartphone cameras to environmental monitoring.

Minot plans to bring the technology to Oregon to grow the new field of research.

SciRIS Stage 1 Awardees

Four groups of scientists received SciRIS Stage 1 awards up to $10K.

Associate Professor of Statistics Yuan Jiang, along with Anna Jolles, professor in the Department of Integrative Biology, received a SciRIS Stage 1 grant for a project which will help fill a knowledge gap and provide crucial tools to understand microbial community dynamics.

The team will develop a novel analytical pipeline that harnesses longitudinal microbiome data to define the ecological roles of host-associate microbes. Although the accumulation of microbial communities is essential to animal health, there are few statistical routes adequate for characterizing microbial community dynamics through time.

Integrative Biology Professor Anna Jolles and Carson College of Veterinary Medicine Professor Claudia Häse will use their SciRIS Stage 1 award to study eco-evolutionary host-bacterial-phage dynamics. Collaborating with a researcher from the University of Louisiana, the group will be using the Pacific oyster and shellfish pathogen Vibrio coralliilyticus as a model system.

In a project entitled “Bioinformatics for integrated river health,” Integrative Biology Professors David Lytle and Anna Jolles, along with Justin Sanders from the Carson College of Veterinary Medicine, will bring together expertise across disciplines to provide an integrated approach to understanding river health. The group will combine expertise in bioinformatic and genetic methods for characterizing aquatic invertebrate communities, aquatic parasite and pathogen communities, and fish microbiomes. Samples will come from the lower Colorado River, an ecologically and culturally significant ecosystem.

Biochemistry and Biophysics Associate Professors David Hendrix and Colin Johnson, along with Professor of Chemistry Claudia Maier and Patrick Reardon, director of the Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Facility at Oregon State, received a SciRIS Stage 1 award to create a pipeline of computational and experimental methods for the prediction, identification and functional characterization of microproteins. Previously dismissed due to their small size, microproteins are now thought to play significant physiological roles including pathological roles in cancer progression.

Disease Mechanism and Prevention Fund

Researching Parkinson’s disease, Associate Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics Alysia Vrailas-Mortimer received a grant from the College of Science Disease Mechanism and Prevention Fund for a project entitled “Why is a fly a good model to study my grandmother’s tremors?”

Similar to the SciRIS-ii, the fund is focused on assisting individual faculty efforts to establish research relationships with external partners for projects specifically related to health science.

Using fruit flies, Vrailas-Mortimer’s goal is to determine how a stress response protein protects against Parkinson’s-associated iron-induced oxidative damage. Parkinson’s affects over one million people in the U.S. and her research could provide the basis for future therapeutic strategies.

With areas of distinction in marine science, materials science, data science, biomedical science – and other research areas, OSU faculty and students are fighting climate change and moving the world forward to a greener future – whether that is through harnessing new materials, interpreting complex data or reimagining how organisms can adapt to changes. We share just a few examples in this three-part series.

Oregon State University scientists are rapidly rising to the challenge of our changing climate, supported by hundreds of graduate and undergraduate researchers who are committed to leaving a better world than the one they inherited. In part three of this series, we examine some of the data-driven research that is helping usher in a new era of climate policy and action.

Mathematics and statistics are two of the quickest-growing fields in the country, and it's not hard to guess why. As technology advances, mathematical modeling or statistical analysis can provide a faster, more reliable way to examine lots of data. In practice, these skills can provide critical insight to collaborative projects or inform policymakers on the most environmentally sound decisions.

Wildlife behavior

Making green energy safer for wildlife

Professor of statistics Lisa Madsen and statisticians from the United States Geological Survey (USGS) have come together to develop methodology to estimate the total mortality of bats, birds and other small creatures on wind farms and solar facilities. The Endangered Species Act requires that wind farms pay particular attention to endangered or threatened species such as golden eagles, brown pelicans, whooping cranes, condors and Indiana bats, which are killed when they accidentally collide with turbine blades.

Madsen and her colleagues have developed complex statistical tools that estimate the actual number of carcasses when they are undetectable for any reason by taking into account a host of predictor variables such as searcher efficiency, variations in plot sizes and location of inaccessible areas.

The software package, created by the team, will be utilized by government agencies as well as Western EcoSystems Technology, Inc., which has already begun to implement the software to assist their clients. The project has also attracted attention from environmental and government agencies in Canada, South Africa, Portugal and Scotland among others. In addition, the USGS statisticians have conducted workshops demonstrating how to use the software to estimate animal mortality at wind and solar energy facilities.

Seed funding from the College of Science Research and Innovation Seed (SciRIS) program continues to bolster ambitious and expansive projects, empowering our scientists to delve into fundamental research discoveries and translate them into revolutionary applications. Founded in 2018, the SciRIS program provides funding for collaborative projects that pursue fundamental discoveries and create societal impact, accelerating the pace of research, discovery and innovation in the College of Science.

Between 2019 and 2021, the SciRIS program provided $763K in seed funding to scientists leading research projects in both basic and applied science and mathematics, with the potential to produce practical solutions for industry, people and the planet.

There are two pathways through this program, the SciRIS Stages 1-3 awards and the SciRIS individual investigator award (SciRIS-ii). The SciRIS Stages 1-3 program funds teams in three stages, ranging from $10K to $125K, to foster team development, build capacity and accelerate project development for procuring larger external grants, while the SciRIS-ii program provides funds ranging from $10K to $20K to individual investigators to establish partnerships, accelerate project development, generate data and manuscripts and foster proposal submissions.

The 2022 Science Research and Innovation Seed Individual Investigator awards (SciRIS-ii) are catalyzing initiatives that will open fresh pathways in science.

Supporting pure and applied mathematics, agriculture, gene therapy, molecular movie technology and quantum mechanics