The McCourt School of Public Policy’s Massive Data Institute awarded its first seed grants to four Georgetown University faculty research projects at the intersection of big data and public policy Sept. 30.

The $40,000 grants were given to projects exploring areas of health and health care, including population displacement, spatial dynamics of the flu, high-need Medicaid enrollees and personalized medicine. Seed grants intend to get the projects sufficiently off the ground, allowing the researchers to apply for larger grants from other organizations in the future.

“The MDI is thrilled to support this research in four critical areas of health and health care. We hope this initial support sets the foundation for the important interdisciplinary projects,” Dean of the McCourt School Edward Montgomery said in a press release.

The MDI was formed last year with the founding of the McCourt School of Public Policy in October 2013 and welcomed applications for seed grants through July 15, 2014. Recipients were notified Aug. 15. The grants require research to be conducted through the 2014-15 school year with a progress report to be submitted at the end of the year.

Computer science professor Lisa Singh, who was part of two separate projects that each received grants, credited the project with building an interdisciplinary community.

“Having something like the MDI gives researchers a cross-discipline opportunity to come together and work on problems they wouldn’t necessarily work on by themselves,” she said.

Susan Martin, director of Georgetown’s Institute for the Study of International Migration, collaborated with Singh to detect early signals of forced migration by analyzing social media data on Twitter.

Martin said that big data could pick up important indicators overlooked by traditional data sources.

“The idea behind the project is that there are many warning signs that don’t come to the surface. … It’s impossible to get at these indicators with traditional data sources because those tend to pick up what we refer to as telling indicators, indicators that only come to surface because the crisis has already happened,” Martin said. “What big data does is to understand information sources from the very local level, including from social media.”

Martin emphasized the project’s value in addressing an age-old humanitarian crisis and in upholding Georgetown’s social justice traditions.

“This gives us an opportunity to use 21st-century technology to respond to an age-old problem, a problem that has been at the heart of the Jesuit tradition for generations,” she said.

Singh, biology professor Shweta Bansal and law professor Lawrence Gostin also received a grant to inform public health policy for influenza with mathematical models and visual analytics of its spatial dynamics. Bansal explained the necessity for this project to cope with the ongoing influenza problem.

“With no apparent end in sight to the annual race against influenza fought in temperate regions like the U.S. (causing up to 50,000 deaths annually and an economic burden of $87 billion/year), combined with the grave risk posed by global influenza approaches, we need to model, predict and explain such events to focus surveillance and control efforts efficiently,” Bansal wrote in an email to The Hoya.

Public policy professor Thomas DeLeire collaborated with Lindsey Leininger of the University of Illinois at Chicago and Mayo Clinic’s Nilay Shah and David Home to predict high-need Medicaid enrollees, thus allowing health care administrators to intervene to improve their health.

DeLeire noted the rewards and challenges of interdisciplinary research.

“If you bring in an individual with a different perspective, different training, different set of methods and different ways of thinking about the problem, it will make additional advances in the solving of the problem,” DeLeire said. “But there are lots of opportunities for miscommunication or not understanding the perspectives of the other individual. So interdisciplinary research is almost like people from different cultures coming together.”

Subha Madhavan, director of the Innovation Center for Biomedical Informatics at the Georgetown University Medical Center, collaborated with other researchers at the Medical Center and the McCourt School’s Health Policy Institute to advance the adoption of personalized medicine in the health care system.

“What we really want to explore is to connect all these data to legal and economic data to identify barriers in the implementation of personalized medicine,” Madhavan said.

“We have partnered with the Georgetown MedStar Hospital system for access to clinical data. Through this collaboration, we have access to a number of patient electronic health records who have been profiled for selection of personalized treatment therapies,” Madhavan said. “What we really want to explore is to connect all these data to health insurance and economic data to identify barriers in the implementation of personalized medicine.”

The professors added that the grant money will also be used in part to support students in data analysis.

“The funds will be used to support students (Ph.D. and undergraduate level) as well as data acquisition and publication costs,” Bansal wrote.