Statistics Professor Babak Shahbaba has been awarded a $1.7 million National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant that could have far-reaching implications for future efforts to address memory impairment. The research involves electrophysiological experiments in rats to study how a brain structure — the hippocampus — supports our ability to remember the daily events of our life. Furthermore, the research should lead to new methodologies for handling huge amounts of complex data. The five-year grant, “Scalable Bayesian Stochastic Process Models for Neural Data Analysis,” is a multidisciplinary collaboration between Shahbaba and fellow Statistics Professor Hernando Ombao and Associate Professor of Neurobiology and Behavior Norbert Fortin.