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Office: 1 Park Place Room 623
Email: eakbas1-at-gsu.edu
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!!! Openings for Phd positions for Spring 2026 and Fall 2026. If you are interested in graph machine learning, send me your resume and transcrip.
Dr. Esra Akbas is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Georgia State University She is the recipient of the prestigious NSF CAREER award and Dean's Early Career award. Before joining Georgia State, she worked as an assistant professor at Oklahoma State University. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science at Florida State University. She leads the Data Engineering Lab (DELab), guiding several PhD, MS, and UG students. Her work spans the algorithmic side of machine learning to applications on different real-world problems, with a particular focus on graph mining, graph machine learning, network science, and their applications in social, biological, and medical domains. She applies her novel graph compressing and GNN models to various problems, including drug-drug interaction prediction, sequence classification, and event prediction. She has published over 50 articles at top-tier venues. She also received NSF CRII funding, NSF Core and 2 NSF REU Site funding to support her research and mentorship activities.
Funded Projects & Awards:
PI: Esra Akbas, NSF CAREER: Advancing GNN via Graph Compressing,
National Science Foundation, 9/2024 -8/2029, $500,000.
https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2337425
PIs: Esra Akbas, DIncer, Guler(GGC), Mehmet Aktas (KSU), Collaborative Research: CISE Core Small: AF: Sheaf Laplacian on Hypergraphs: From Theory to Applications
National Science Foundation, 9/2025 -8/2027, $400,000.
https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2523659&HistoricalAwards=false
Dean's Early Career Award, Georgia State University, 2025
PI: Esra Akbas, NSF REU Supplement:Advancing GNN via Graph Compressing
National Science Foundation, 12/2024 -11/2025, $16,000,
PI: Esra Akbas, Co-PI; Mehmet Aktas, NSF REU Site: Multidisciplinary Graph Data Analytics,
National Science Foundation, 1/2024-1/2027, $372,360.
https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2349486&HistoricalAwards=false
PI: Esra Akbas, NSF REU Supplement: III: Structure-aware Graph Compressing: From Algorithms to Applications,
National Science Foundation, 6/2023 -5/2024, $16,000
PI: Esra Akbas, NSF CRII: III: Structure-aware Graph Compressing: From Algorithms to Applications,
National Science Foundation, 8/2021 -7/2024, $174,337
https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2308206&HistoricalAwards=false
PI: Esra Akbas, Co-PI; Chris Crick, NSF REU Site: Big Data Analytics at Oklahoma State University,
National Science Foundation, 3/2021-8/2022, $402,772.
Junior Faculty Award for Scholarly Excellence in the Natural Sciences, Oklahoma State University, 2021
OSU A&S ASR+1: Graph compressing for expediting graph analysis, 2020, $11,111.
Grace Hopper Celebration (GHC) Faculty Scholarship, 2019
