Blair Goes the Distance with Network Optimization

An associate professor of biostatistics in the School of Public Health and Health Professions, she's working to make these mathematical frameworks more accessible and practical.

"Sometimes you want to improve a disease outcome or use social influence metrics to minimize disease spread," says Blair, whose current research focuses on network optimization. Her work ultimately could help identify novel quarantine strategies to mitigate disease outbreaks or help scientists prioritize which genetic mutations to test in laboratory settings.

The path to becoming a network optimization researcher wasn't straightforward for this first-generation college student. Encouraged by parents who fostered her natural curiosity—particularly her father, whom she describes as a naturally curious “genius"—Blair started high school in basic math classes before a teacher recognized her potential and moved her to an honors class. Her educational journey led her to graduate school at Case Western, where she worked in computational biology and applied mathematics, then to the Jackson Laboratory, where she was part of the sole statistical genetics group at the "mouse genetics capital of the world."

Now, back in her hometown of Buffalo, she's helping prepare the next generation for an AI-driven future. She developed and teaches very popular courses in statistical data mining that emphasize "storytelling with data," drawing students from a range of fields. As associate director of education for the Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Data Science (IAD), she organizes workshops and specialized courses, seeing an encouraging surge in interest in AI and data science training.

Blair’s research and teaching philosophies converge in their emphasis on practical application. Last semester, she helped coordinate an IAD experiential course. Students’ projects included a law firm developing an AI chatbot for competitive research and a historical society using data science to promote historic property preservation.

Her collaborative approach has already yielded promising results. Through her National Science Foundation-funded research on plant networks, she's developing methods to help scientists navigate what can often be an overwhelming number of possible genetic modifications.

"If you think about what perturbations—small changes— can be made to a highly interconnected network to achieve a desired health outcome, the number of perturbations is impossible to enumerate and test experimentally,” she explains. "Things don't happen in isolation, and our work provides a way to identify and test network perturbations in computational statistical models."

When she's not solving complex mathematical problems or teaching, Blair finds clarity in long-distance running, completing two to three marathons annually. "Training is the best part—the solitude, the hard work," she says, having conquered races from Nashville to Bar Harbor.

Blair is truly an evangelist for a data-literate world, which accounts for her role in helping to bake the opportunity to gain data literacy into a UB education, no matter which discipline a student comes from.

Blair is also knee-deep in interdisciplinary research, which she considers a career highlight. That’s partly because her work, she asserts, has “very broad applicability; it can be generalized in many fields that want to move to more data-driven approaches and use data better.