University of Kentucky Archives

Dr. Alan Fryar received his BS in Geology and History from Duke University in 1984, his MS in Geology from Texas A&M University in 1986, and his PhD in Geology from the University of Alberta (Canada) in 1992. From 1992 to 1995, he was a Research Associate in the Bureau of Economic Geology at the University of Texas at Austin. Since 1995, he has been a faculty member in the Department of Geological Sciences (now Earth and Environmental Sciences) at the University of Kentucky, where he is currently a Professor. He teaches courses in hydrology, hydrogeology, and environmental geology. He has graduated eight PhD and 17 MS advisees.

His current and recent research projects include groundwater flow and chemistry in karst regions of Morocco and China; occurrence of arsenic in floodplains of the Ganges and Mekong rivers; transport of bacteria in karst aquifers in Kentucky; and groundwater-stream interactions in major river valleys in Kentucky. Dr. Fryar was the principal investigator for two projects, funded by the US Department of State, to build capacity for graduate education in hydrology in Morocco, Egypt, Turkey, and Indonesia. He has also received grants from the National Science Foundation, the US Department of Energy, the US Geological Survey, and the state of Kentucky. He has authored or co-authored 64 papers in international scientific journals, 13 conference papers, four book chapters, six book reviews, and essays in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Earth Magazine, and International Educator.

Dr. Fryar is a fellow of the Geological Society of America (GSA) and past chair of its hydrogeology division. He is a member of the American Geophysical Union, the International Association of GeoChemistry, the International Association of Hydrogeologists (IAH), and the National Ground Water Association. He is book review editor of the journal Groundwater and former co-editor of the journal Environmental & Engineering Geoscience. He was a Fulbright Specialist to Pakistan (December 2009–January 2010) and India (February-March 2017) and a Fulbright Scholar to Morocco (January-May 2014). He received the International Service Award from the IAH US National Chapter and the GSA Hydrogeology Division Distinguished Service Award.

Studies of how climate change affects water resources in India have emphasized changes in monsoon rainfall and stream flow. The sensitivity of springs, which are important water sources in rural mountainous areas of northern India, to climate and land use/cover changes has received less attention. Dr. Fryar’s Fulbright-Kalam project proposes to study how karst (limestone) springs on the Shillong Plateau respond to rainfall. He intends to review existing data and reports; select springs for sampling; deploy sensors that record water level, temperature, and chemistry for at least one year; and identify timing and sources of recharge. These activities will be coordinated with local stakeholders.

Dr. Ramakanth Kavuluru is a professor of biomedical informatics (Department of Internal Medicine) in the College of Medicine at the University of Kentucky (UKY). He also has a joint courtesy appointment in the Department of Computer Science at UKY. He graduated with a PhD in computer science in 2009 from UKY with a focus on the security properties of pseudorandom sequences. Subsequently, he worked in knowledge-based search systems for focused bioscience domains as a postdoctoral scholar at Wright State University. Since 2011, he has been working as a faculty member at UKY focusing on natural language processing methods and their use in biomedicine and healthcare.

High-level applications of Dr. Kavuluru’s research include cohort selection for clinical trials, literature-based knowledge discovery, computer-assisted coding, social media-based surveillance for substance abuse, and clinical-decision support for precision medicine. He employs methods from machine learning (including deep learning) and data mining fields to drive his research agenda. His recent methodological contributions deal with zero-shot and few-shot classification, large language models, transfer learning, domain adaptation, and end-to-end relation extraction. Thus far, in his capacity as primary advisor, he has helped seven doctoral students and 10 master’s students attain their graduation.

Predicting disease onset ahead of time is an important application of artificial intelligence (AI) and this is being actively pursued in the U.S. and other western nations. From a global health perspective, it is not clear if the implications of the findings of U.S. patient-based modeling translate to more populous and diverse areas of the world. Thus, using latest machine learning methods and data sets from Indian healthcare facilities, Dr. Kavuluru’s Fulbright-Nehru project is rigorously assessing how well the promise of AI holds when applied to the Indian patient setting compared to the simpler standard-of-care approaches to risk stratification.