Project Grant 2133170

This $274,774 National Science Foundation project grant supports research at Penn State University from September 2022 through August 2025 under the NSF Engineering program (CFDA 47.041). The research aims to develop optimized pooled testing strategies for efficiently tracking disease prevalence and accurately diagnosing infections during pandemics. Specifically, the project will design effective sampling and testing algorithms to estimate prevalence under limited testing resource constraints. It will also focus on optimized pooling and decoding algorithms for compressed sensing-based diagnostic testing using quantitative viral load measurements. Additionally, the research will validate the accuracy and efficiency of proposed pooled testing through experiments on anonymized COVID-19 samples. The work bridges group testing and online learning to effectively allocate scarce testing resources for prevalence tracking and diagnosis, with the goal of significantly increasing testing throughput and reducing reagent usage.