PhD Candidate in Health Informatics
Abhishek Bhatia
Ab · hi · shek Bha · ti · a
About
Background
I am currently a PhD candidate at the Carolina Health Informatics Program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where I work as a Graduate Research Assistant with Emily Pfaff at the NC TraCS Institute and as a Research Affiliate in the Hino-Sebastian Flood Lab.
Prior to this, I was a Research Scientist at CrisisReady, a joint initiative between Harvard University and Direct Relief, and spent several years at the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights and at the Mittal Institute at Harvard University. I received an MS from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Global Health and Population department, and undergraduate degrees from the University of California, Berkeley.
Research Philosophy
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Experience & Education
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Research
My research broadly focuses on two areas:
Health Informatics. I combine disparate data sources to estimate the effects of environmental exposures on individual-level health, applying computational methods in statistical learning, causal inference, and spatio-temporal analysis to large-scale clinical, demographic, and geographic data.
Public Health. I combine large-scale field survey data, syndromic surveillance data, and novel mobility data streams for equitable humanitarian crisis response — in the context of the War in Syria, the 2018 Floods in India, and the Rohingya Refugee Crisis in Bangladesh.
Misc
I’m trying to use this space to vibe code — build things quickly, try out whatever tools I’m experimenting with at the time, and see what comes out. A lot of these posts are aided by AI tools, code generators, or whatever else I am testing. Part of this is about building faster. The bigger part is figuring out what I am okay using these tools for, how to use them responsibly, and where the line is between support and replacing thinking I should do myself.
Contact
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Email: abhatia [at] unc [dot] edu
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