Yakshitha Poonati – M.S in Health Informatics student (Co-op)

Yakshitha Poonati earned a bachelor's degree in Dentistry from Mamatha Dental College, Khammam, India. As a dentist, she interacted with patients, learned about their concerns, and treated them for three years. Her research interests are preventive health promotion with personal health informatics and secondary prevention using automated AI devices that work based on pattern recognition and machine learning. Yakshitha's goal is to identify ways in which these technologies can be made more feasible to implement and deploy in U.S and global health care.

Christina Tong – BS in Health Science student

Christina is a Health Science student with a passion for public health and research, looking to pursue a career in the field. She has a strong interest in improving long term health outcomes through activity monitoring and the impact that this can have on a wider scale. 

Laura (Pia) Domenech Estarellas ​– Personal Health Informatics doctoral student

Pia is a first-year Personal Health Informatics PhD student. She earned her B.S. in Neuroscience and Cognitive Studies from Tulane University in 2022. She is interested in leveraging data from mobile and sensor technologies to better understand and treat mental health issues. Pia hopes to conduct research that applies to rural populations and minorities, specifically, the Hispanic/Latinx population. 

Pia is co-mentored by Prof. Aarti Sathyanarayana.

Yash Sanghvi ​– BS in Health Science student (co-op)

Yashi is an undergraduate Health Science student currently working as a co-op on the PAAWS project. 

Aryton Hoi ​– BS in Computer Science student

Aryton is interested in the application of computer science within the field of human health. He has previously completed a co-op at MIT Lincoln Labs with Group 48 working on an automated 3D axon tracing UNet neural network, and has also won an award at HackMIT2019 with a submission aimed at combatting media echo chambers.

Shashank Jarmale ​– BS in Computer Science and Business Administration student

Shashank is interested in applications of computer and data science to the physical sciences, especially medicine, energy, and the environment. He previously worked on a project revolving around machine learning-based detection of heart arrhythmias like atrial fibrillation using ECG data from wearable sensors. His hope is to work on applications of ML in domains that help build a healthier and more sustainable world.

Arya Shukla ​– BS in Data Science and Health Science and MS in DS student

Arya is interested in interdisciplinary research that combines her passions for public health and data. She is interested in how data analytics might help improve health systems, biotech, and pharmaceutical drug testing.

Dhivas Sugumar ​– BS in Computer Science student

Dhivas is interested in the use of wearable technology to detect illnesses in people at early stage and how doing so might help them receive treatment in time. He is working on new ways of visualizing intensive longitudinal data acquired from smartwatches and smartphones. 

Kyleigh Watson ​– BS in Health Sciences student

Kyleigh is a 4th year Honors Health Science student from Long Island, New York interested in pursuing a career in public health. She is currently working on my Honors Capstone project with the mHealth Research Group. This project is conducting research on the use of personal data tracking tools for health research.  

Vivek Sharma – M.S in Information Systems student

Vivek completed his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from GBPUAT, Pantnagar, India. He has experience working as a software developer at Tata Consultancy Services, India for more than two years. He has been working on IoT modules since his bachelors degree, and started working on Android and IoT integration in 2019.  He is working on developing some IoT room sensors using Arduino for research projects with the mHealth Research Group. 

Prathamesh Sahasrabuddhe – M.S in Information Systems student

Prathamesh completed his undergraduate degree in engineering in information technology from the University of Mumbai. He has been working in Android Development since 2015 and is an active contributor to the open-source community. He has built a custom version of Android called "FireHound." Many OEM developers developed builds of FireHound for their devices and posted them on respective forums. In 2017, he found a UI bug in Stock Android OS now patched in every Android Device manufactured after 2017. He's worked on apps for the police and on an Android security infrastructure for preventing reverse engineering of proprietary applications. He is working on app development for research projects with the mHealth Research Group. 

Aiden Borts ​– BS in Health Sciences student

Aiden is in interested in exercise science along with health, especially how wearable technology can lead to better health outcomes for people.  He has worked in the Biomechanics & Musculoskeletal Epidemiology Lab at Northeastern where he helped the research team use wearable technology to develop rehabilitation treatments for people who suffer from knee osteoarthritis.  As a co-op student working with the mHealth group, he is working on a large project that aims to develop algorithms to detect physical activity, sedentary behavior, and sleep from wearable sensors. 

Harish ​Sivaprakash – M.S in Information Systems student

Harish Sivaprakash is an Information Systems Graduate Student at Northeastern University. He has experience working as a full stack developer at product startup Configit in India for two years. He is working on creating an open-source video annotation tool for use by the mHealth Research Group and others.

Krit Goyal ​– M.S in Computer Science student

Krit earned his B.E(Hons.) in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from BITS Pilani, India in 2017. He then worked for an year at Samsung Research Institute, Noida as a software developer on the Codec team. He is currently working as an Android smartphone and wearables programmer at mHealth Research Group. He is developing the microT app which forms the basis of the Micro Ecological Momentary Assessments(μEMA) study, to collect round the clock data using built-in sensors and micro surveys from study participants. Krit is particularly interested in using data mining and machine learning techniques to draw inferences from this real world data.

Evan Andre ​– BS in Computer Science student

Evan is interested in data science, and in the past, has applied this to help develop a report on how campaign finance influences voting on energy-related legislation. He hopes to use these skills in conjunction with the cybersecurity and health disciplines. He is working as a co-op student on a project developing new algorithms for detection of physical activity, sedentary behavior, and sleep. 

Tony Lazenka

Tony is an accomplished mobile application developer working in the Boston area, who previously earned his MS in Computer Science at Northeastern University after earning a BA in Computer Science from Yale. Tony continues to work with the group on analyzing data from the CITY weight loss intervention project. He currently works at a Boston-area mHealth startup. 

Dharam Maniar

Dharam completed an MS in Computer Science at Northeastern. He worked at Infosys as a systems engineer for 2.5 yrs after completing his Bachelors in Computer Engineering from Mumbai University and now works as a software developer at SmarterTravel. Dharam worked on developing the core of the current mHealth Group EMA software -- both mobile data collection and server-side data visualization -- and he started our work on microinteraction EMA. He continues to work with the group to publish results and extensions of this work.

Caitlin Haynes

Caitlin completed her MPH from Northeastern University after earning a B.S. in Health Sciences from Boston University. Her MPH capstone research project involved testing a system designed to improve Ecological Momentary Assessment, using microinteractions and smartwatches. Caitlin continues to work with the group to publish results and extensions of this work. She currently works as Assistant Director of the Brookline Office of Diversity, Inclusion and Community Relations. She assists in providing education, advocacy and referral services to the Brookline community and acts as the Coordinator for the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). 

Anmol Sakarda

Anmol started working with the mHealth Group as a senior at Acton-Boxborough Regional High School as a summer volunteer (2017 and 2018). He will be matriculating into Northeastern as a new student in the College of Computer and Information Science in September 2018. Anmol has excelled at math and, among other things, written legislation approved by the Massachusetts State Senate to encourage public schools to offer whole food plant-based meal options and nutrition-based education to students. Anmol has assisted the mHealth Group with with accelerometer data management tasks and writing code to scrape Zillow for information about housing sales, relevant to the virtual bicycle highway project. He plans to continue working on this project.

Barbara Krug - Freelance artist

Barb is a game artist. Previously she earned a MFA in scenic design for theater from the University of California Irvine. Barb is currently working on the MDCAS crowdsourcing project and is interested in creating games for good. Barb thinks that in ten years new mHealth technology will change the way people take care of their bodies and hopefully help the health care system. Read more… ​

Apra Gupta - B.S. in Computer Science and Cognitive Psychology student

Apra is a sophomore Honors student at Northeastern with an obsession with learning new technologies and a deep curiosity about the human brain. She has extensive prior experience conducting independent research and designing software solutions to real-life issues. She enjoys the feeling of unraveling technologies that are new to her, and she has recently been getting involved in Machine Learning and AI technologies and hopes to find novel and creative ways to apply these cutting-edge concepts in personal health informatics!

Adeeb Arif ​– M.S in Computer Science student

Chaitanya Kaul ​– M.S in Computer Science student

Chaitanya previously earned a degree in Computer Science from NMIMS University, Mumbai, India. He has worked as a mobile application developer intern, doing both Android and iOS programming. He recently worked on a JavaScript-based web application using the MEAN stack that allows researchers using EMA systems developed by the mHealth Research Group as part of several funded studies to decrypt and plot data. The tool is critical to the success of the projects, which deploy smartphone and smartwatch technology to participants in the field and require remote data monitoring.​

Shantanu ​Kawlekar – M.S in Computer Science student

Shantanu is a Computer Science graduate student at Northeastern University. He earned a Bachelors in Information Technology from Mumbai University. He enjoys hackathons and has won prizes for some at Northeastern University, IIT-Bombay and UC Berkeley. He has worked as a Software Engineering Co-op at Logitech, Inc. In the mHealth Group, Shantanu is working on the NHANES dataset physical activity processing using AWS cloud computing.

Siddhesh Salgaonkar ​– M.S in Computer Science student

Siddhesh is a Computer Science graduate student at Northeastern University. He earned a Bachelors of Engineering in Information Technology from Sardar Patel Institute of Technology, Mumbai, India in 2012. He has 3+ years of software development experience as a Full Stack Software Engineer in QuinStreet, Inc., Pune, India. At Northeastern, he had a co-op with New York Life Insurance Company, New York. With the mHealth Group, he is working on data analysis for the NHANES accelerometer dataset using AWS-based cloud computing technologies.

Chandrika Sharma ​– M.S in Computer Science student

 Chandrika is a Computer Science graduate student at Northeastern University. She earned a Bachelors of Computer Science from the M.S.Ramaiah Institute Of Technology in Bangalore, India in 2013. She has wored as an Associate Technology Consultant IT Risk Assurance at EY, and as a full stack developer at her co-op with New York Life Labs. Chandrika wants to build applications that transform the lives of physically challenged individuals

Jason Lai - B.S. in Health Sciences student

Jason is a 4th year Health Science student and plans on going to dental school.  Last fall he worked as an Ophthalmic Technician at Mass Eye and Ear.  Jason is interested in integrating technology into his field of study. Jason is helping the mHealth Group work on technology to encourage active transportation.   

Justine Lo ​– M.S in Computer Science student

Justine earned her B.S. in Biomedical Engineering at Boston University. She has since worked as a Biomedical Engineer at the Institute for Aging Research at Hebrew SeniorLife, doing clinical research identifying and studying biomarkers for falls and other physical measures, such as standing balance and gait, in elderly adults. Some of her work involved analyzing the effects of health and wellness interventions using wireless sensors, multi-scale entropy, and muscle co-contraction.​ Justine is assisting with data collection for projects on automatic recognition of behavior from mobile data. 

Sandarsh Srivastav ​– M.S in Computer Science student

Sandarsh completed his undergraduate education from Jaypee University of Information Technology, India. He has since worked as a technology consultant at Computer Sciences Corporation and a software developer intern at the New York Life Insurance Company. Sandarsh is currently working on the NHANES AWS project and is interested in ensuring that cloud technologies can enable powerful and collective insights from various sources of health data (sensors, phones, and human-computer interfaces) that will be a foundation for healthcare systems of the future. Sandarsh is a certified AWS Developer. He thinks that in ten years, new mHealth technology will be capable of estimating correlations and analyzing individual health data from various sources against global trends on huge datasets, providing suggestions and predictions based on that analysis and enable users to make better health decisions and lifestyle choices.

Ishan Patel ​– M.S in Computer Science student

Ishan is a Computer Science graduate student at Northeastern University. He earned a Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Engineering from Gujarat Technological University, India. His interests include artificial intelligence, game development and machine learning.. With the mHealth Group, he is working on developing games for citizen science, where the game-playing crowd in cloud labels data that supports behaviorally-related health science research.  

Anne Smithey – B.S in Health Sciences student

Anne Smithey is a senior in the Health Science program. Among other jobs, Anne has worked as a research assistant in the Infection Control Department at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and as a senior health educator and leadership council member for Peer Health Exchange in Boston. With the mHealth Research Group, Anne is working on the Virtual Bicycle Highway project.

Krystal Huey – Doctorate of Pharmacy student

Krystal is a fifth-year pharmacy student interested in how technology may impact pharmacy practice. Krystal has worked as a clinical trial coordinator and team manager at Brain Power, LLC, as a translational medicine clinical intern at the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research, and as a research assistant and peer tutor at Northeastern. With the mHealth Research Group, she is working on a study to validate microinteraction ecological momentary assessment (μEMA) for behavioural measurement.

Karmen Lu - B.S. in Computer Science student

Karmen is a rising sophomore in Computer Science at Northeastern. She is helping with mHealth Group mobile activity recognition projects this summer.  

Rohan Jahagirdar ​– M.S in Information Systems student

Rohan completed his undergraduate studies from Mumbai University, India. He worked for a startup called 135 Tech Labs developing mobile applications, backend data architecture, infrastructure scaling and mobile and web SDKs and APIs. He has worked as a research assistant working as a data architect at Northeastern, and as a Java Developer Intern with HealthEdge Software. He is currently working on developing mobile games-with-a-purpose to help researchers label mobile data to support machine learning and health experiments. 
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Clarence Hann ​– M.S in Game Science and Design student

Clarence is a Game Science and Design student at Northeastern, and he has completed his Bachelor of Science degree in Software Engineering at East China Normal University. He has experience in Unity Game development as well as .NET application development. He is working on the design and development of serious games that assist researchers who need labeled datasets to support the development of new algorithms for behavioral measurement using wearable sensors and mobile phones. 
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Aiden Zhang - B.A. in Computer Science and Economics student

Aiden is a rising senior in Computer Science and Economics at Brandeis University. He worked as data analyst intern in TalkingData last summer, where he did a project analyzing mobile app usage data. He is working with the mHealth Group this summer helping with mobile activity recognition projects. 

Alums

Spencer Franklin – Computer Science and Game Design student

Spencer is a 4th year B.S. in Computer Science and Game Design student.
He has worked on a diverse set of games at various times, as a developer, artist, or QA tester. He is especially interested in designing educational games. For the mHealth Research Group, Spencer is working on software development for the MDCAS crowdsourcing project. 

Ranadeep Guha ​– M.S in Information Systems student

Ranadeep is a second year Information Systems student at Northeastern University and has completed his Bachelors in Computer Science and Engineering at Heritage Institute of Technology, India in 2013. He has 4 years of industrial experience in Software Development, DevOps and Quality Engineering in companies including New York Life, Cognizant and Ericsson. He is extremely passionate about architecting applications on the cloud, experimenting with frontier technologies and solving coding puzzles. He is an AWS Certified Solutions Architect and Developer. At the mHealth group, he is using his expertise in developing on-demand and scalable applications on the cloud to run algorithms for analyzing data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) study.​

Nihar Patel ​– M.S in Computer Science student

Nihar Patel holds a bachelor's degree in computer engineering from Gujarat Technological University, India. His interest lies in machine learning and artificial intelligence. In the mHealth group, he is working developing Unity games-with-a-purpose to help with labeling accelerometer data to support machine learning.  

Spencer Franklin – Computer Science and Game Design student

Spencer is a 4th year B.S. in Computer Science and Game Design student.
He has worked on a diverse set of games at various times, as a developer, artist, or QA tester. He is especially interested in designing educational games. For the mHealth Research Group, Spencer is working on software development for the MDCAS crowdsourcing project. 

Max Rais – B.S in Computer Science and Game Design student

Max is a fourth-year undergrad CS and Game Design student. Max has previously worked as a software engineering intern at Intuit, and has participated on teams programming games and applications using Unity for clients as car companies and publishers. He helped the team making games for science in Unity as part of the MDCAS crowdsourcing project. ​

Sushant Mimani ​– M.S in Computer Science student

Sushant worked as an SAP consultant for 4 years after earning a B.S. in Computer Science and Engineering from Manipal Institute of Technology, India. He has also worked as a software developer and a DevOps engineer during his internship and co-op as a master's degree candidate. Sushant recently worked on developing programs for data QC and analysis of the mHealth NHANES PAM dataset and is interested in Cloud infrastructure deployment and provisioning and big data processing.

Ayush Kumar Singh ​– M.S in Computer Science student

Ayush previously earned a Bachelor of Technology in Computer Science and Engineering from Graphic Era University in Dehradun, India. He has worked as a machine learning intern for Dassault Systèmes and a software engineer for TripAdvisor. Ayush recently worked on NHANES AWS project and is interested in real time inference systems using machine learning on large-scale sensor data.