Dr. Parisa Rashidi, an assistant professor in the J. Crayton Pruitt Family Department of Engineering, has been named a National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program Award winner.

Rashidi’s achievement will allow her to advance her exploration of machine learning algorithms and critical care medicine. Precise assessment and prediction of patient status in the ICU can enable early interventions and can result in improved patient outcomes. However, today’s ICUs still face many barriers for assessing and predicting patient status. Essential information such as pain and functional status are not captured automatically, but rather are repetitively measured by ICU nurses and existing methods have limited accuracy and infrequently used. This leads to missing opportunities for early interventions.

This will represent the first attempt to autonomously assess pain and functional status in the ICU, to predict precise patient trajectory from high-resolution data, and to improve predictive clinical models through user feedback. In addition, the research will contribute to a broader understanding of future design considerations for the next generation of lifelong learning systems and intelligent hospitals.

This award will also support students in her lab with an environment to develop focused research and training activities. It will also provide a highly-integrated research and education program for Florida high school students with summer internships for math teachers and intelligent machine workshops on coding and machine intelligence. The outreach and training programs will be used to promoted interest in science technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields among Florida high school students.

CAREER awards are the NSF’s most prestigious award for junior faculty and are designed to help provide a foundation for a lifetime of scientific leadership. The awards are given to an outstanding scientist who exemplifies the role of teacher-scholars through research, education and the integration of education and research.

Congratulations, Dr. Rashidi!