Group member Raunek Dey, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Physics, has recently received three awards through the University of Maryland (UMD) to fund his research and conference travel.

UMD Microbiome Center Summer Scholarship

This scholarship was awarded to Raunak through the UMD Center of Excellence in Microbiome Studies to support his research project entitled, “Inferring Microbe-Virus Ecological Networks from Population Dynamics with Multimodal Learning” for the summer of 2024. Launched in 2023, the Center funds projects in pursuit of its mission to deepen understanding of “complex microbial communities, and how those microbiomes interact with each other and with our ecosystem.”

Thomas G. Mason Interdisciplinary Physics Fund

This award given by the UMD Department of Physics exposes “talented doctoral students to problems and approaches in non-physics disciplines through summer interaction with professors in other departments.” Aided by this fund, Raunak’s goal is to integrate Deep Learning based approaches in virus-microbe network inference and time series modeling.

International Conference Student Support Award (ICSSA)

Raunak received the ICSSA award through UMD that covers the registration fees of international conferences. Raunak is presenting a poster at the International School and Conference on Network Science (NetSci 2024) and also delivering a talk at the Statistical Inference of Network Models Symposium this June in Quebec city, Canada.