Grant to Support Big-Data Alzheimer’s Research

Jim Russell ’83

Dr. Sungeun Kim, an electrical and computer engineering faculty member, received a grant of nearly $119,000 to use big-data techniques in support of earlier and more accurate diagnosis of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s.

The grant, from the National Library of Medicine of the National Institutes of Health, will assist a project—“Integrating Neuroimaging, Multi-omics, and Clinical Data in Complex Disease”—that Kim has underway in collaboration with two other researchers.

An assistant professor at SUNY Oswego since 2016, Kim also is an adjunct assistant research professor at Indiana University School of Medicine, where he has worked for years on projects related to Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and other diseases exhibiting progressive dementia.

Kim, whose research interests span and make use of such disciplines as bioinformatics, bioinstrumentation, neuroscience and genetics, joins Indiana University colleague Kwangsik Nho and Geisinger Health System faculty member Dokyoon Kim as principal investigators on the project.

The importance of his work, Kim said, is in combining layers of massive datasets from disparate sources, then testing and validating it, to analyze genes, biomarkers and patient data for better predicting the onset of neurodegenerative diseases and paving the way for earlier treatment and the development of more effective drugs. The results would contribute to software that would be made available to other researchers in the field.

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