Kalpana Raja Awarded NIH SBIR Grant to Assess Immunology Dataset Quality

Kalpana Raja, PhD, MRSB, CSci, has been awarded a $90,000 Small Business Innovation Research grant in partnership with Ividence, Inc. from National Institutes of Health to develop an advanced AI-assisted framework for assessing the quality of immunology datasets. The one-year project runs from September 2025 through September 2026.

The project titled "Assessing Immunology Dataset Quality through Literature Mining," addresses a critical challenge in scientific research: ensuring the reliability and reproducibility of immunology data. Raja will use natural language processing and large language model methods to evaluate immunology datasets in repositories such as ImmPort.

The project has two main aims. First, Raja will develop information extraction approaches to identify datasets mentioned in scientific publications and link them to their corresponding IDs. Second, she will use sentiment analysis to assess how these datasets are discussed in literature, generating comprehensive quality scores that will be accessible through application programming interfaces for seamless integration with the repositories related to immunology.

By mining scientific literature to evaluate dataset quality this work aims to strengthen the reliability of immunology research and address the broader reproducibility challenges facing the scientific community.

Learn more about Raja's research on Yale School of Medicine's website.