Abhishek Bhatia

Profile photo of Abhishek Bhatia

[About]

I’m a computational health scientist studying how movement, exposure, and place shape health. I’m drawn to a range of data, from field surveys, to health records and administrative data, to high-throughput digital traces and satellite-derived exposures. I also have a secondary interest in privacy, reproducible open science, and human rights.

I’m currently a PhD candidate at the Carolina Health Informatics Program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, advised by Dr. Emily Pfaff at the NC TraCS Institute. My collaborative and affiliate work spans other labs and centers at UNC, including the Hino Lab, the Carolina Population Center, the Fry Lab, and UNC Health. You can read more about my current research and the methods I apply on the research page.

Before UNC, I was a Research Scientist at CrisisReady, a joint initiative between Harvard University and Direct Relief, after spending several years at the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights and the Mittal Institute, both 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.

My CV is available here.

My research broadly focuses on two areas:

  1. 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.

  2. 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, the Rohingya Refugee Crisis in Bangladesh, and climate-driven displacement in North Carolina.

Effect of Paxlovid Treatment during Acute COVID-19 on Long COVID Onset: An EHR-Based Target Trial Emulation from the N3C and RECOVER Consortia

Alexander Preiss, Abhishek Bhatia, Leyna V. Aragon, John M. Baratta, Monika Baskaran, Frank Blancero, M. Daniel Brannock, Robert F. Chew, Ivan Diaz, Megan Fitzgerald, Elizabeth P. Kelly, Andrea Zhou, Thomas W. Carton, Fei Wang, Rainu Kaushal, Christopher G. Chute, Melissa Haendel, Richard Moffitt, Emily Pfaff, N3C Consortium, the RECOVER Cohort

PLOS Medicine PDF for Effect of Paxlovid Treatment during Acute COVID-19 on Long COVID Onset: An EHR-Based Target Trial Emulation from the N3C and RECOVER Consortia Project for Effect of Paxlovid Treatment during Acute COVID-19 on Long COVID Onset: An EHR-Based Target Trial Emulation from the N3C and RECOVER Consortia

[Around]

Nov 2025
Atlanta, GA · panel

At the Intersection of Health and Place: Integrating Electronic Health Records with Geospatial Data for Research, Practice, and Policy.

Apr 2025
Washington, DC · oral presentation

Patient Addresses in Electronic Health Records: New Source of Data on Spatial Mobility?