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

Quantitative methods for measuring neighborhood characteristics in neighborhood health research

Duncan, D. T., Goedel, W. C., & Chunara, R. (n.d.). In Neighborhoods and Health (1–).

Publication year

2018

Page(s)

57-90

Reports of the workshops held at the 2018 international AAAI conference on web and social media

Socio-spatial self-organizing maps: Using social media to assess relevant geographies for exposure to social processes

Tracking health seeking behavior during an Ebola outbreak via mobile phones and SMS

Denominator Issues for Personally Generated Data in Population Health Monitoring

Determinants of participants' follow-up and characterization of representativeness in flu near you, a participatory disease surveillance system

Etiology of respiratory tract infections in the community and clinic in Ilorin, Nigeria

High-resolution temporal representations of alcohol and tobacco behaviors from social media data

Network inference from multimodal data: A review of approaches from infectious disease transmission

Characterizing sleep issues using Twitter

Estimating influenza attack rates in the United States using a participatory cohort

Flu near you: Crowdsourced symptom reporting spanning 2 influenza seasons

Surveillance of acute respiratory infections using community-submitted symptoms and specimens for molecular diagnostic testing

A case study of the New York City 2012-2013 influenza season with daily geocoded Twitter data from temporal and spatiotemporal perspectives

Public health for the people: Participatory infectious disease surveillance in the digital age

Assessing the Online Social Environment for Surveillance of Obesity Prevalence

Monitoring Influenza Epidemics in China with Search Query from Baidu

Twitter as a Sentinel in Emergency Situations: Lessons from the Boston Marathon Explosions

Using search queries for malaria surveillance, Thailand

Why we need crowdsourced data in infectious disease surveillance

New technologies for reporting real-time emergent infections

Online reporting for malaria surveillance using micro-monetary incentives, in urban India 2010-2011

Preventing Pandemics Via International Development: A Systems Approach

Social and news media enable estimation of epidemiological patterns early in the 2010 Haitian cholera outbreak

Suspended microchannel resonators with piezoresistive sensors