Federal Grant Award Summary

The University of Central Florida Board of Trustees received a $520,000 Project Grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Division of Information and Intelligent Systems under the Computer and Information Science and Engineering program (CFDA 47.070), awarded July 15, 2026, with completion targeted for June 30, 2030. This collaborative research initiative develops hardware-algorithm co-design solutions for efficient artificial intelligence (AI) accelerators specialized in molecular biology and genomics analysis. The project delivers new AI algorithms capable of capturing direct and indirect interactions within complex biological networks, novel hardware-software architectures optimized for scalable processing of molecular and genomic data, and graph theory-based computational frameworks to model multi-step dependencies in biological systems. These research outputs are designed to accelerate the analysis of complex molecular and protein interactions while overcoming scalability barriers in machine learning applications for large-scale biomedical discovery.

The project's deliverables include simulation toolkits and computational frameworks disseminated through peer-reviewed publications, conference presentations, and professional meetings to support the broader biomedical research community. The research integrates discovery with education, contributing to workforce development in advanced computing and computational biology. By enabling faster and more accurate modeling of molecular function and genome regulation, the research addresses critical challenges in understanding how molecules and genes interact within biological systems, with applications across cellular processes, functional genomics, and systems biology research.