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Research Spotlight: Liz Marai, Assistant Professor

Assistant Professor Liz Marai has been awarded an NSF CAREER grant, that agency's most prestigious award for junior faculty. The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is a Foundation-wide activity that offers the National Science Foundation's most prestigious awards in support of the early career-development activities of those teacher-scholars who most effectively integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their organization. Such activities should build a firm foundation for a lifetime of leadership in integrating education and research.

Dr. Marai's work under this grant will investigate in much more detail the human anatomy and dynamics to further progress in replicating human articulation capabilities. To overcome long-standing imaging limitations, the project follows a data-driven approach, in which sampled dynamic motion data is used to infer unknown parameters such as soft-tissue geometry and behavior. The project is cross-disciplinary and driven by specific problems in orthopaedics and human character animation, although its focus is fundamentally on computational and automated analysis tools. The research plan develops computational tools for capturing robustly and accurately dynamic skeletal motion from medical images, for inferring biological shape and behavior from dynamic motion information, and for representing and calculating with these data. The education effort is naturally integrated with the research work, and includes recruiting and training graduate, undergraduate, and high-school students into multi-disciplinary work, through a modeling and simulation approach to teaching computer graphics. The outcome of the project is a set of human-anatomy based (i.e., humanoid) models of articulations that impacts orthopaedists' understanding of articulation injury and disease, leads to improved diagnosis and medical treatment, and improves the realism of digital character animation. The broad impact of the project includes applications in biology, bioengineering, ergonomics, evolutionary biology and robotics.

Dr. Marai's NSF CAREER award is one more honor recently garnered by our faculty, and part of continuing department member recognition. Currently, there are three other active NSF CAREER awards in our department. Six CS faculty have received NSF CAREER awards since the program's inception in 1995.

You can find more information about Dr. Marai's research projects from her personal web page.

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