Selections for the third round of Next Generation Program proposals were announced during the winter of 2018. Clusters/themes included:
Harnessing Modern Biotechnologies and Bioinformatics to Improve Public Health: This cluster will be dedicated to the improvement of health and well-being through innovative applications of big data analysis to further collaborative biomedical research by biologists, public health researchers and computer scientists. The team will include faculty across the departments of Computer Science and Biology, the School of Public Health and the Institute for Biomedical Sciences. The project will apply analytics to public health and therapeutics, promote the development of methods for the control and prevention of epidemics and pandemics, and improve institutional support for commercialization of new therapeutics.
Interpersonal Violence Initiative: This area will bring together policy evaluation, research into biobehavioral causes and outcomes, and research into prevention science methodology. Interpersonal violence has significant negative outcomes for victims, including a wide range of health, behavioral and social problems, along with economic challenges. Researchers will seek to understand the causes and consequences of interpersonal violence, inform public policy and emphasize the development, refinement and evaluation of interventions to reduce or prevent interpersonal violence. The Department of Psychology, the School of Public Health and the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies will collaborate in this initiative.
Population Health and Precision Medicine: This program will combine multiple fields of research and scholarship to address how precision medicine, which is the application of modern genomic and data science techniques to tailor health care to individual variation in human disease, can advance the health of the population. There have been legal, ethical and economic concerns raised about precision medicine, but there is no integrated approach in the field. Georgia State’s efforts to develop such an approach will involve the Institute for Biomedical Science, the Department of Biology, the School of Public Health, the College of Law’s Center for Law, Health and Society, and the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies.
Legal Analytics: This area will take the university’s new Legal Analytics Lab, a project of the J. Mack Robinson College of Business and the College of Law and help expand the lab’s innovative research at the junction of law and data science. Advances in data science now allow for the extraction of information from massive amounts of legal documents quickly and efficiently. These tools can also be used to build predictive models to forecast the filing and outcome of litigation, predict judges’ decisions given the facts of a case, identify terms likely to lead to contract disputes and predict patent challenges.