Zoom Link: https://tinyurl.com/ywzvd2fd

Abstract: Starting a grant application can take hours of focused time before any science gets written: finding opportunities that fit, reading long announcements, building a checklist, and finding co-investigators. GrantOtter is an AI grant assistant that handles this work in a single conversation. From a researcher’s name and institution, it builds a sourced profile, checks thousands of federal and foundation opportunities for eligibility, scores them for fit, and emails ranked matches, each with the reason it fits. From a match or a linked announcement, it sets the deadline, builds the submission checklist, and brainstorms concepts with rough budgets based on the team’s expertise. It then drafts the specific aims, biosketch, data management plan, and budget brief, and marks anything it cannot verify as a placeholder. Questions about people are answered from a research map of Emory. This is a knowledge graph built from public sources that links about 5,400 faculty, 3,000 research topics, and 6,000 NIH awards through co-authorship, award, topic, and department ties. It is searched by meaning rather than keywords, and every answer points back to its source. The session has two live demonstrations. The first is a researcher’s first 20 minutes on a new account, from profile to draft aims. The second is the view a dean or chair uses to map a unit’s research strengths and gaps and plan a center-grant application.

Bio: Dr. Yuke (Andrew) Wang is an Assistant Research Professor at the Hubert Department of Global Health, with joint appointment in the Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics, at the Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University. He is the core member of the Center for Global Safe Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (CGSW) and the Center for Infectious Disease Modeling and Analytics & Training Hub (CIDMATH) at Emory University. His research focuses on statistical modeling for multi-pathway exposure assessment, wastewater surveillance sampling design, pathogen shedding kinetics, and infectious disease transmission. He co-founded Shedding Hub (https://sheddinghub.org/), a CDC-supported open science repository of more than 75,000 biomarker shedding measurements curated through a human-reviewed AI pipeline, and founded GrantOtter (https://grantotter.com/), an AI grant assistant used by researchers at more than 50 institutions. He holds a PhD in Biostatistics from Georgia State University and an MSPH in Biostatistics from Emory University.