Dr. Fukuyama has received a three-year award from the National Science Foundation’s Emerging Mathematics in Biology program for her project, “Accurate strain-level identification of microbes from limited data: characterizing, reducing, and quantifying ambiguity.”
The project will develop methods for identifying microbial strains from pooled metagenomic data, with particular attention to understanding when strains can be reliably distinguished and quantifying uncertainty when the available data are limited. The work has applications in epidemiology, where accurate strain identification can help researchers reconstruct disease transmission, and will be used to design more informative sequencing experiments.
