This Doctor From Kashmir Uses Machine Learning To Crunch Coronavirus Data

A physician-turned-entrepreneur raised in Kashmir is now part of a team using big data and machine learning to help detect useful patterns in the tsunami of public health data generated world-wide by the COVID-19 crisis and do what he can for those back home. Junaid Nabi, a public health researcher at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston, says his experiences with the health system in the developing world drives his current work. "Growing up in Kashmir, a society marred with social, economic, and healthcare disparities, I was exposed to the inherent inequities in my community at an early age," he said, "During the final years of my training, I had an opportunity to work with some non-profit organizations, especially the rescue teams during the Savar building collapse in Dhaka, Bangladesh." "This is when I noticed that clinical medicine does not answer all the questions clinical work asks." Nabi, who is also an Aspen New Voices Fellow, is now working with colleagues at Harvard Medical School and Harvard School of Public Health to develop digital tools that harness big data and machine learning to rapidly evaluate patterns in the data pouring in from clinical research. "I believe machine learning has an important role in COVID-19," he said.