Boston University trustee Bahaa Hariri has pledged $15 million to build an institute that will focus on research and initiatives that use computation for interdisciplinary applications, according to a report in BU Today.
Faculty at the Bahaa Hariri Institute for Computational Science and Engineering will focus on applying computation to four main application-based clusters, including biology and medicine; physical science and engineering; social and management sciences; and the arts, communication and education.
Azer Bestavros, a BU College of Arts & Sciences professor of computer science, will serve as the institutes’s founding director.
“Computational and data-driven methods play a crucial role in all four of the targeted application clusters,” said Bestavros, in the BU Today article.
Examples of these applications, he said in the article, include using computational immunology research to change how new vaccines are developed and merging collected geoscience data to model environmental changes. The institute is scheduled to be operating by next fall.