cv
Experience
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2025 - present Associate Professor (Research)
University of Pennsylvania
- Department of Computer and Information Science
- Annenberg School of Communication (secondary appointment)
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2020 - 2025 Assistant Professor (Research)
University of Pennsylvania
- Department of Computer and Information Science
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2020 - present Senior Fellow
Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics
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2018 - present Research Scientist
Penn Medicine Center for Digital Health
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2017 - 2018 Postdoctoral Researcher
University of Pennsylvania
- World Well-Being Project & Center for Digital Health
Education
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- 2017 Ph.D. in Computer Science
Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
- Thesis: Modeling User Factors in Multimedia Preferences
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- 2013 B.E. (Hons) in Computer Science
BITS-Pilani, India
Grants & Funding
- Total external funding as PI: $5.1M+
- World Bank Group — Mapping Gender Norms in Global Entertainment Media, PI ($494,960, 2025–2027)
- NSF — BioFoundry: AI-Driven RNA BioFoundry, co-I ($24M total, 2024–2030)
- CDC — Mobilizing Social Media for Violence Prevention, co-I (2024–2026)
- Penn Global — Conversational Voicebots to Enhance English Learning for Indian Students, co-PI ($110,000, 2024–2026)
- Global Engagement Fund — Clinical Multimodal Integration for Glioblastoma, co-PI ($128,000, 2024–2026)
- NIH NIMHD — COVID-19 Misinformation in Black and Rural Communities, PI ($3.9M, 2022–2025)
- NIH NHLBI — Mentoring and Patient-Oriented Research in Cardiovascular Health, co-I (2021–2025)
- World Bank Group — Computational Social Listening for Crisis Informatics, PI ($49,309, 2021–2024)
- Global Engagement Fund – India — Vaccine Attitudes in India, PI ($94,534, 2022–2025)
- Penn University Research Fund — Computational Social Listening for Vaccine Hesitancy, PI ($50,000, 2022–2023)
Honors & Awards
- Appointed Member, NACMHD Working Group (NIH National Advisory Council on Minority Health and Health Disparities)
- Alien of Extraordinary Ability (EB-1A), USCIS — granted for sustained national/international acclaim in health informatics and AI
- Best Reviewer Award, AAAI ICWSM 2022
- Intel Invent50 Finalist (top 5 of 150 teams), 2015
- Nanyang Engineering Doctoral Research Award, 2013
Service
- Area Chair: EMNLP 2024 (Health & Medicine, Industry Track), AAAI ICWSM 2022–2025, ACM WebSci 2022–2024
- Associate Editor: Nature Scientific Reports · ACM Transactions on Computing for Healthcare · Frontiers in Psychology · Frontiers in Digital Health
- Program Committee: ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, AAAI, WWW, ACM CSCW, ACM CHI
- Reviewer: PNAS, JAMA Network Open, Nature Communications, IEEE Trans. Affective Computing, Journal of Medical Internet Research
- Grant Panels: NIH, NSF