Rumi Chunara

Associate Professor of Biostatistics

Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, Tandon

Director of Center for Health Data Science

Professional overview

The overarching goal of Dr. Rumi Chunara's research is to develop computational and statistical approaches for acquiring, integrating and using data to improve population-level public health. She focuses on the design and development of data mining and machine learning methods to address challenges related to data and goals of public health, as well as fairness and ethics in the design and use of data and algorithms embedded in social systems.

At NYU, Dr. Chunara also leads the Chunara Lab, which develops computational and statistical methods across data mining, natural language processing, spatio-temporal analyses and machine learning, to study population health. Previously, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow and Instructor at HealthMap and the Children's Hospital Informatics Program at Harvard Medical School. She completed her PhD at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology and BSc at Caltech.

Education

BS, Electrical Engineering (Honors), Caltech

MS, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT

PhD, Medical and Electrical Engineering, MIT (Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology)

Honors and awards

Max Planck Sabbatical Award (2021)

speaker at NSF Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate Career Proposal Writing Workshop (2020)

Invited tutorial on Public Health and Machine Learning at ACM Conference on Health, Inference and Learning (2020)

Keynote at Human Computation and Crowdsourcing (2019)

Invited Speaker at Expert Group Meeting at United Nations Population Fund, Advances in Mobile Technologies for Data Collection Panel (2019)

Keynote at ''Mapping the Equity Dimensions of Artificial Intelligence in Public Health'', University of Toronto (2019)

Facebook Research Award (2019)

Gates Foundation Grand Challenges Exploration Award (2019)

NSF CAREER Award (2019)

MIT Technology Review Top 35 Innovators Under 35 (2014)

MIT Presidential Fellow (2004)

Areas of research and study

Health Disparities

Machine learning

Social Computing

Social Determinants of Health

Publications

Publications

Colorectal Cancer Racial Equity Post Volume, Content, and Exposure: Observational Study Using Twitter Data

Association between visit frequency, continuity of care, and pharmacy fill adherence in heart failure patients

Associations between news coverage, social media discussions, and search trends about celebrity deaths, screening, and other colorectal cancer-related events

Constructing Social Vulnerability Indexes with Increased Data and Machine Learning Highlight the Importance of Wealth Across Global Contexts

Making Sense of Social Media Data About Colorectal Cancer Screening

Utilizing big data without domain knowledge impacts public health decision-making

Area-based determinants of outreach vaccination for reaching vulnerable populations: A cross-sectional study in Pakistan

Cohort profile: a large EHR-based cohort with linked pharmacy refill and neighbourhood social determinants of health data to assess heart failure medication adherence

Global prevalence and content of information about alcohol use as a cancer risk factor on Twitter

National cervical cancer burden estimation through systematic review and analysis of publicly available data in Pakistan

Neighborhood-Level Socioeconomic Status and Prescription Fill Patterns among Patients with Heart Failure

Neighborhood-Level Socioeconomic Status and Prescription Fill Patterns Among Patients With Heart Failure

Prevalence of familial hypercholesterolemia in a country-wide laboratory network in Pakistan: 10-year data from 988, 306 patients

Structural racism and homophobia evaluated through social media sentiment combined with activity spaces and associations with mental health among young sexual minority men

Association Between Copayment Amount and Filling of Medications for Angiotensin Receptor Neprilysin Inhibitors in Patients With Heart Failure

Association of U.S. birth, duration of residence in the U.S., and atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease risk factors among Asian adults

Building Public Health Surveillance 3.0: Emerging Timely Measures of Physical, Economic, and Social Environmental Conditions Affecting Health

Discrimination is associated with C-reactive protein among young sexual minority men

Evidence for Telemedicine’s Ongoing Transformation of Health Care Delivery Since the Onset of COVID-19: Retrospective Observational Study

Generalizability challenges of mortality risk prediction models: A retrospective analysis on a multi-center database

Impact of COVID-19 forecast visualizations on pandemic risk perceptions

Search Term Identification Methods for Computational Health Communication: Word Embedding and Network Approach for Health Content on YouTube

Machine learning and algorithmic fairness in public and population health

Social Determinants in Machine Learning Cardiovascular Disease Prediction Models: A Systematic Review

Telemedicine and healthcare disparities: a cohort study in a large healthcare system in New York City during COVID-19