UC Noyce Initiative Awards $3.4 million

The UC Noyce Initiative has announced a new round of research awards totaling nearly $3.4 million to support collaborative teams advancing computational health and cybersecurity across the University of California system.

Selected from a highly competitive pool of proposals, the awards fund interdisciplinary teams spanning UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UC Irvine, UC San Francisco and UC Santa Barbara. The projects reflect the initiative’s mission to harness the collective strength of five UC campuses to drive digital innovation for the public good. Each award averages approximately $400,000 and will be distributed over a one-year period.

“This year’s awards highlight the extraordinary depth of expertise across our campuses and the power of collaboration,” said Bryan Kerner, executive director of the UC Noyce Initiative. “By bringing together leading researchers across disciplines and institutions, we are accelerating solutions to complex challenges in health and cybersecurity that have real and immediate societal impact.”

The funded projects bring together expertise in medicine, engineering, artificial intelligence and data science to address urgent issues ranging from disease detection and precision health to data privacy and secure AI systems. Additionally, each project has faculty from at least three of the participating campuses as part of the research team.

Simon Atkinson, vice chancellor for research at UC Davis and chair of the initiative’s executive committee, emphasized the rigor of the selection process.

“This was an exceptionally strong and competitive pool,” Atkinson said. “The selected teams stood out for both their scientific innovation and their commitment to true cross-campus collaboration. These projects exemplify what is possible when we align the strengths of five UC campuses to advance research that benefits society.”

Awarded projects

Computational Health

• Multi-Scale Molecular Biomarker Discovery for Early Detection and Monitoring of Myocarditis
  Lead PI: Arun Padmanabhan (UC San Francisco)
  Co-PIs: Javid Moslehi (UC San Francisco), Javier Lopez (UC Davis), Wei Li (UC Irvine), Marc Hellerstein (UC Berkeley)
• A multi-scale model of glucose homeostasis: from enzymes to organ systems
  Lead PI: John Albeck (UC Davis)
  Co-PIs: Mark Huising (UC Davis), Denis Titov (UC Berkeley), Cholsoon Jang (UC Irvine)
• Discovering context-specific statin response biology for efficacy and adverse effects through scalable, dimension-reduced modeling of real-world data
  Lead PI: Marisa Medina (UC San Francisco)
  Co-PIs: Haiyan Huang (UC Berkeley), Min Zhang (UC Irvine), Akinyemi Oni-Orisan (UC San Francisco)
   
• Decoding Kidney Transplant Rejection Through Multi-Scale Computational Integration of Single-Cell, Spatial, and Multi-Omic Data
  Lead PI: Peng He (UC San Francisco)
  Co-PIs: Aijun Wang (UC Davis), Seyed Ali Mortazavi (UC Irvine)
   

Cybersecurity

• Children’s Privacy in AI Chatbots
  Lead PI: Athina Markopoulou (UC Irvine)
  Co-PIs: Zubair Shafiq (UC Davis), Camille Crittenden (UC Berkeley)
• Towards Robust Vision Language Models in Clinical Applications
  Lead PI: Hamed Pirsiavash (UC Davis)
  Co-PIs: Ramtin Pedarsani (UC Santa Barbara), Reza Abbasi-Asl (UC San Francisco)
• Building secure-by-design AI systems
  Lead PI: Samuel King (UC Davis)
  Co-PIs: Yubei Chen (UC Davis), David Wagner (UC Berkeley), Jintao Jiao (UC Berkeley), Wenbo Guo (UC Santa Barbara)
• Efficient and Scalable Cyber Defenses with Specialized Agents, Models, and Benchmarking
  Lead PI: Wenbo Guo (UC Santa Barbara)
  Co-PIs: Dawn Song (UC Berkeley), Muhao Chen (UC Davis)

Across both focus areas, the selected projects share a common goal: ensuring that advances in digital technologies are not only powerful, but also secure, trustworthy and designed to benefit society. In addition, theses UC Noyce Initiative awards are designed to catalyze novel, early-stage ideas by providing critical seed funding that enables researchers to generate proof points and pursue larger-scale support from external partners.

The awards also reinforce the UC Noyce Initiative’s role as a catalyst for sustained collaboration, connecting researchers, shared infrastructure and new ideas across campuses. By investing in these teams, the initiative continues to build a foundation for innovation that reflects the legacy of Robert N. Noyce and Ann S. Bowers, as well as harness the collective power of the UC system working as one.