Lobaton Receives NSF CAREER Award

Dr. Edgar Lobaton, assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at North Carolina State University, has received a Faculty Early Career Development Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Dr. Edgar Lobaton, assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at North Carolina State University, has received a Faculty Early Career Development Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

The NSF CAREER award is one of the most prestigious awards in support of junior faculty members who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations.

The NSF will provide $492,109 in funding over five years to support his project, “Data Representation and Modeling for Unleashing the Potential of Multi-Modal Wearable Sensing Systems.” This research is supported by the NSF’s Division of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS).

The goal of this project is to develop a computational framework that unleashes the potential of physiological and environmental multi-modal wearable systems and aims to develop methodology for the estimation and prediction of physiological responses and environmental factors, with the objective of enabling users to efficiently change their behavior. Lobaton’s research will accomplish this by using the framework to build on tools from statistical analysis, topological data analysis, optimization theory and human behavior analysis.

The educational plan of this project is to take the datasets and algorithms developed and incorporate them into a new graduate course on computational techniques for physiological and environmental sensing that will be provided at the graduate level and undergraduate students will be engaged by participating in data collection experiments, REUs and local demonstrations. Underrepresented undergraduate student communities will be exposed to the research at the national level by presenting demos at well-known diversity conferences in the STEM fields and K-12 local student communities will be engaged via summer workshops that will be prepared for students and educators.

Lobaton received a B.S. degree in electrical engineering and mathematics from Seattle University (2004) and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer sciences from the University of California, Berkeley (2009).

Credit: College of Engineering News