Rumi Chunara

Associate Professor, Biostatistics and Computer Science & Engineering

Director, Center for Health Data Science

New York University, School of Global Public Health and
Tandon School of Engineering

Publications | Group | Teaching | Awards | Press

Themes of public health and equity inspire my innovations in computer science and statistics. These themes have led to my focus on:

1) Design and development of data mining and machine learning methods to address challenges related to data and goals of public health, including:


2) Fairness and ethics in the design and use of data and algorithms embedded in health systems, including:
My focus on public health, which is concerned with the individual, collective, environmental and organizational factors, in and out of the hospital, that affect the health of human populations, naturally bridges my work with fields such as economics, policy, sociology, urban planning and healthcare. Accordingly, I have sourced and work with many forms of information including social media, mobile phone, satellite imagery, electronic health record, telemedicine, and claims data. In sum, my lab makes transformative scholarly contribution to computer science inspired by the opportunity of new data sources and problems in public health.

In recent years, I have collaborated and developed a body of work related to cardiovascular disease (JACC 2023, Prog Card Dis 2023, Prev Med 2022) and best practices for teaching in Health Data Science (Harvard Data Sci Review 2022, Lancet Global Health 2023). Please see my google scholar page for a full list of publications.

*Updates*
*We are launching a new Center for Health Data Science at NYU. Stay tuned for more!
*I gave a lecture as part of the Suessmilch Lecture series at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research on "Using Data to Advance the Science of Health Disparities". Gave a similar talk at the USC Institute on Inequalities in Global Health
*I am the PI of a new training program from the NIH: the NYU-Moi Data Science for Social Determinants Training Program

Selected Awards and Honors

Selected Press