NSF Funds UVA Research on Modeling Water Dynamics in Freshwater Ecosystems

The University of Virginia's School of Data Science is pleased to announce that the National Science Foundation recently awarded Sheng Li, an associate professor with the school, a grant to fund research into how physics-guided graph network models can be used to observe water dynamics in freshwater ecosystems. Li will collaborate on the project with Xiaowei Jia, an assistant professor with the University of Pittsburgh’s Department of Computer Science. 

Freshwater ecosystems play a vital role in global economic, food, water, and energy networks, but they face continuing threats. Ongoing and timely monitoring of these systems is critical to informing policy and management systems surrounding water-related challenges, including droughts and floods. 

Li's and Jia's project will build on the promise shown by the use of machine learning to assess complex water dynamics and aim to develop a physics-guided graph network model -- which will include new architectures -- to monitor water dynamics that, to date, have been poorly observed in freshwater ecosystems. 

Li joined UVA's School of Data Science in 2022. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from Northeastern University, as well as an M.S. in Information Security and B.S. in Computer Science from Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications.