Duke University has announced a five-year, $1.5 million grant from the Simons Foundation in support of research related to how large volumes of data are mined, stored, and transmitted.

Awarded through the Simons Foundation's Math + X Investigator program, which provides research funds to professors at American and Canadian universities to encourage novel collaborations between mathematicians and researchers in another field of science or engineering, the funds will support Duke mathematician Ingrid Daubechies's efforts to use computational geometry to build algorithms that analyze large datasets — ECG tracings, high-resolution scans of fossils, paintings, and other complex digital data — more quickly and efficiently.

"The large volumes of data that are being generated left and right definitely present a serious challenge," said Daubechies, professor of mathematics and electrical and computer engineering at Duke.

Born in a small coal mining town in Belgium, Daubechies earned a bachelor’s degree in theoretical physics and a Ph.D. in quantum mechanics from the Free University of Brussels. After earning her doctorate in 1980, she became one of the world’s leading authorities on wavelet theory, a refinement of a mathematical Fourier technique used to shrink digital photos and movies so they take up fewer kilobytes without a noticeable loss of detail. Before joining the Duke faculty in 2011, Daubechies held positions at Bell Laboratories, the University of Michigan, Rutgers University, and Princeton University.