Sharath Chandra Guntuku

Sharath Chandra Guntuku directs the Computational Social Listening Lab at Penn. He holds a secondary appointment in the Annenberg School of Communication.

His research is at the intersection of artificial intelligence, public health informatics, and health data science, leveraging large-scale digital data – social media, electronic health records, online reviews, and smartphone-based interactions – to uncover insights that improve health outcomes and reduce health disparities.

He develops natural language processing and machine learning methods to monitor and predict health-related behaviors, assess mental health at individual and population levels, stratify risk across diverse populations, and design scalable, culturally informed interventions, including conversational agents for health behavior change.

This interdisciplinary research agenda is supported by over $5.1 million USD in external funding and has led to publications in PNAS, JAMA Network Open, npj Digital Medicine, ACL/EMNLP/NAACL (*CL), AAAI ICWSM, and ACM CHI, with applications ranging from clinical decision support to real-time public health surveillance, implemented with partners including state Departments of Health and the World Bank Group.

His work has been covered by the American Psychological Association, WIRED, The Atlantic, Thomson Reuters, US News, and other media venues.

Affiliations: Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics · Penn Medicine Center for Digital Health · World Well-Being Project · Penn Research in Machine Learning · Penn NLP